en

The Rules of Life: Vyacheslav Balbek

24.09.2018
Vyacheslav Balbek, co-founder of the 2B.group studio:

“Architecture and design are forever in my blood”

Reputation is ahead of fame. If you are a well-known and experienced architect, your decisions must be strong and balanced. When I was young and inexperienced, I perceived conflicts with customers much harder.

The human factor is very high: you need to run through a brick wall to get the perfect object. Of course, there are projects that we are dissatisfied with. I may not like some color, and we quarrel with the client, but it's not me who’ll live in this interior. For me it's a personal loss, but not a global one: you did not solve your creative problem.

The concept of trends is very broad. Most often we work with young professionals, young customers. We do not work with deputies and giant corporations.

In my practice it is difficult to say what is most appreciated. If you create an architectural project "for ages", you need to abstract from some style. It must be completely independent and have an individual image.

Social networks for me - information background. This is one of the motivators that makes you move forward. Of course, you want to share the best. And that’s how you motivate your friends: everyone wants to be better, because their friends are getting better. This is one of the main advantages.

We do not really talk about certain objects publicly. There are many reasons for this: the terms "burned", materials did not arrive, something was ruined by contractors, somewhere we did not agree with the customer. But even if we did not put such a project on the network, we became stronger, hardened, and got tremendous experience in operating or managerial work.

Working in a team is the basis of success. You will never achieve the same volume, pace and quality if you’re working alone, you can not take into account all these components. One person can make one object, but not five and not thirty-five at the same time. At the same time, we do not have the goal of doing as many projects as possible. I just want to grow and leave more after myself.

Since we develop all the interior items ourselves, one day we realised a lack of details and elements. So we came to the product design. At first, these were single objects, for example, a chair or a table for soccer. And then we decided to do it in parallel, because other architects and projects may face this problem.

I met ODESD2 at the Don’t Take Fake festival, where they performed with the Q1 chair. Then it was just a prototype, but I noticed that the guys created the product. Now, in my opinion, this is the strongest young team. They are fast growing, young, Ukrainian.

ODESD2 were the first to call themselves production and invited other designers to cooperate. Before that, Ukraine had a slightly different policy: you create the design by yourself, produce and sell it by yourself. And the guys offered a good model: they established production and offered cooperation to the rest.

I like our first object, the BB1 chair. Later we optimized it, made a backrest. We struggled a bit with its inclination, wanted to make comfortable, took a lot of time to make this part of the design perfect. The product turned out to be beautiful, concise and complete.

More and more I am attracted to social projects. You do them "with yourself": not for money, not because someone owes it. These are projects where you set a goal for yourself and cope with it yourself. Any social project that we are currently doing, we do with love and we are honest with ourselves.

Often I assume more than I need to, and I understand it when the point of no return is already passed. Then I have to look for a balance. I found it with the sport. "Loading" on the mental side, "unloading" - on the sports.

I like, probably, all kinds of sports. I would even do go or curling. In sport, you automatically become better, honing your skills.

The perfect day is the one that differs from the previous one. I'm always busy, just switching between processes. Of course, I would like to have more time and unload myself from the work, take a timeout for two or three years, but still stay in my right mind. But then it would be cool to return to the same point.

Architecture and design are forever in my blood. Even if I start doing something else, and in my thirties I will be asked to design something, I will do it.

Interviewed by Yaroslava Kobynets