Learning from Stolipinovo: The Pink Book

This publication is the narrative about the ten-month winding path of the project Building Together: Learning from Stolipinovo. About the stereotypes we have overcome and the friendships we have made working together. About our way of rethinking the role of art and architecture in bringing communities together. About the art of the craftsmen. The challenge of ‘seeing’ beyond the obvious and finding inspiration in a different way of life.
We present all this in stories about the project through different prisms and media — images and text. The narratives are personal, the events — true and concrete. We have chosen those ‘lessons from Stolipinovo’ that are important to us — those that helped us and inspired us, and also those which refuted us and surprised us. This is our way of sharing several guidelines for approaching the conceptualization and implementation of socially based architectural projects, especially those involving different ethnic groups and/or minorities.
For us, this was not a standard design and implementation project, nor it was simply discovering new things. Building Together: Learning from Stolipinovo was a process of searching and recognizing.