Follow this tag to curate your own personalized Activity Stream and email alerts.
The Swiss firm Herzog & de Meuron has unveiled plans to redevelop a six-hectares old factory area in the heart of Moscow. Located at the former Badaevskiy Brewery that sits along the river, the project will renovate and repurpose the remaining clusters given the site's cultural heritage... View full entry
A new tour group fusing Soviet architecture with the latest Russian electronica is launching a series of outdoor parties amid the historic courtyards of central Moscow.
Culture group MosKultProg will be holding two events in March, mixing historian Sergey Niktin's historical tour along Moscow's legendary Kutuzovsky Prospekt with sets from St Peterburg-based DJ Egor Holkin.
— Calvert Journal
Moscow keeps expanding its options for exploring the city's mesmerizing architecture: if you've done the virtual/augmented reality tours of never-realized icons of Soviet architecture and already 'Pokémon Go-caught' all the famous figures of Russian history via the Know Moscow.Photo. app, you... View full entry
OMA/Rem Koolhaas have released plans for their redesign of Moscow's New Tretyakov Gallery on Krymsky Val. As one of Russia's largest museums, the space hosts 20th century Russian and Soviet art including works by Malevich, Kandinsky, Chagall, and Soviet artists such as Aleksandr Deyneka and Vera... View full entry
New virtual reality tours are giving Muscovites the chance to see the Russian capital as the socialist utopia envisioned by the city’s Soviet architects.
The new project, The Moscow That Never Was, lets visitors glimpse shelved Soviet landmarks as they should have appeared on Moscow’s streets using VR goggles.
— Calvert Journal
The 2-hour virtual/augmented reality tours through central Moscow feature utopian architectural projects that never quite saw the light of day, including the infamous Palace of the Soviets (imagined as the world's tallest building, crowned with a 300-ft Lenin statue), an alternate Lenin... View full entry
The Russian President Vladimir Putin opened Zaryadye Park near Red Square on 9 September, designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, creators of New York’s High Line, but what Moscow city officials are lauding as a “new symbol of Russia” preservationists are decrying as a travesty that impinges on the Kremlin and St Basil’s Cathedral, two of Russia’s most sacred landmarks. — The Art Newspaper
Diller Scofidio + Renfro's Zaryadye Park proposal for an ambitious replacement of the colossal Soviet-era Hotel Russia near the Kremlin in central Moscow won the international competition back in 2013 with a "wild urbanism" concept. Rendering of DS+R's Zaryadye Park project in central Moscow... View full entry
In a scene from Dead Poets Society, Robin Williams' character, the English teacher John Keating, famously climbs on top his desk to remind himself, and his students, that "we must look at things in a different way. The world looks very different from up here." Thanks to satellite and drone... View full entry
As government officials in Moscow earmark Constructivist buildings for demolition in a massive project to relocate up to 1.6 million of the city’s residents, a non-profit museum dedicated to preserving Russia’s avant-garde architecture has opened in the Shabolovka neighbourhood. — The Art Newspaper
The new Avant-Garde Museum is located in Na Shabolovke Gallery, which is a part of Khavsko-Shabolovsky housing complex built in the late 1920s by the rationalist Asnova (Association of New Architects). It is part of a district with a rich heritage of early Soviet architecture and design... View full entry
An interactive map of the former Soviet Union’s Constructivist architectural heritage went online just days before the city of Moscow published a list of 4,500 apartment buildings proposed for demolition as part of a plan to relocate up to 1.6 million residents. Describe by many residents as a property grab [...] the demolition plan has proven so unpopular that thousands turned up for a demonstration against it in Moscow on Sunday 14 May carrying signs with slogans like “My house is my castle”. — The Art Newspaper
"The plan has also alarmed preservationists," The Art Newspaper writes. "Initially described as an effort to upgrade residents from pre-fabricated mass housing built under Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, the architectural targets have broadened and fears are mounting that it has become a... View full entry
Larger than the entirety of Monaco, the VDNKh is a trade show and amusement park in Moscow that houses, alongside other things, a slew of historical national pavilions and teaching spaces. Recently, an urban farm was added to the site, intended to serve as both a leisure space and an educational... View full entry
This post is brought to you by Strelka Institute. During the new academic year Strelka students will answer the question: ‘What has become “The New Normal” in the modern world?’Strelka Institute for architecture, media and design launched the enrollment campaign for the postgraduate... View full entry
Moscow City Hall has announced the launch of its own version of online game “Pokemon Go.” Russians will be asked to find and "catch" historical figures in the streets of the capital via an app called “Know Moscow.Photo.”
[...] people will be able to catch and take a selfie with [...] Yury Gagarin, Alexander Pushkin, Pyotr Chaikovsky, [founder of the first Russian university] Mikhail Lomonosov, Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Napoleon Bonaparte and the tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich,” [...]
— The Moscow Times
Related stories in the Archinect news:No, Pokémon Go is not an urban fantasy for the new flaneurMoscow's metro expansion moves ahead of scheduleMoscow's iconic Shukhov Tower added to World Monuments Fund Watch List View full entry
The already rapid expansion of the Moscow metro may be picking up steam, if a flurry of announcements in recent days is to be believed.
A brand-new portion of the Butovskaya metro line, which will link the southernmost stations of the orange and gray Lines, may be open to the public by the end of this week, Deputy Mayor Marat Khusnullin said Friday, RIA Novosti reported.
— the Moscow Times
"The new line will include three stations — Ulitsa Starokachalovskaya, with a transfer to the gray line station Bulvar Dmitria Donskogo, Lesoparkovaya and Bitsevsky Park, which connects to the orange line station Novoyasenevskaya."Moscow is in the midst of a major infrastructure-overhaul, with... View full entry
The Shukhov Tower, a 1920s broadcast transmission tower in Moscow that is a landmark of modernist structural engineering, has been placed on the 2016 World Monuments Fund Watch list of endangered global cultural heritage sites.
Activists in Moscow organized two days of events over the weekend to observe the tower’s 94th birthday [...]
At a Kremlin meeting last December, Mr. Putin praised activists for rallying to save cultural heritage sites and dressed down officials for not doing enough.
— nytimes.com
The Shukhov Tower, also known as Shabolovka Tower, previously in the Archinect news:Russia's Shukhov Tower is saved following a 91% smartphone vote in favor of keeping itMoscow Puts Iconic Shukhov Tower on Protected Landmark ListArchitects Try to Save a Tower in Moscow View full entry
Amelia Taylor-Hochberg penned an essay on The humanity of the Chicago Architecture Biennial, wherein she argues "the Biennial is more about architects than it is about architecture." Meanwhile Julia Ingalls reviewed the book Conversations with Architects: In the Age of Celebrity, by former... View full entry
Instead of belching oppressive fumes over Moscow's recently pedestrianized Red October District, the iconic smokestacks of the century-old GES2 power station will be transformed into conduits for ventilation as part of the Renzo Piano Building Workshop's sustainable redesign of the facility into... View full entry
