For Nikita Yavein's team, this is already the second project in Kazakhstan. As in the case of the Palace of Schoolchildren's Creativity, the architects used the motives of the national Kazakh architecture in their project. And if the palace has become a kind of paraphrase of the traditional nomad's yurt, now the steppe pyramid has become the source of inspiration, and the principle of spiral movement is the basis of the architectural concept. The space of the Museum is organized in a spiral, its expositions unfold and streams of visitors move. “The spiral is the oldest symbol of striving towards the center, towards enlightenment and comprehension of the meaning of life,” explains Nikita Yavein. - The spiral denotes eternal development with its cyclical processes: the change of seasons, the growth and waning of the moon, birth and death. It seemed to us that for a museum, the exposition of which is dedicated to history, its cycles and turns, this image suits perfectly well”.
There are two main spiral trajectories in the developed project. One passes inside the building, and moving along it, visitors to the museum will have the opportunity to make a consistent excursion into the history of Kazakhstan from ancient times to the present day. The second spiral ramp wrapped the building from the outside - this is a walking path that runs along the exploited roof of the structure. Along it you can climb to the top of the complex, looking at the panoramas of Astana and bas-reliefs on the themes of Kazakh history along the way, forming a continuous ribbon on the facades. It is also important that on each floor the outer and inner ramps are connected by special passages, so that from studying history at any time it will be possible to switch to acquaintance with the landscapes of today.
Thus, the structure of the museum can be described as two ziggurats nested within each other. True, the architects themselves, although they do not deny the obvious similarity with these ancient structures, insist that their building was inspired, first of all, by mounds - steppe pyramids, the most reliable keepers of traces of the material culture of nomadic peoples. The mounds on the territory of Kazakhstan and Altai really often had a stepped shape "a la ziggurat" - the semantics of both types of buildings went back to the image of a sacred mountain crowned with a world tree. By the way, it is planned to plant several trees on the upper level of the building, which will surround the pyramidal top of the glazed atrium.
The light well, the presence of which this element is unambiguously indicated, runs through the entire building, including its underground levels. At the level of minus 4 meters, the architects place an underground lake, on the bank of which there is an elevator platform. This is the starting point of view, from here the whole structure of the museum appears at a glance. Architects deliberately glaze one of the interior walls of the museum so that the exhibition spaces are visible behind it, and a drawing depicting a "cut of cultural layers" is applied to the opposite opaque surface.
The spiral has four main levels vertically. Each of them is dedicated to its own historical period: ancient, pre-Soviet, Soviet and modern - and at each turn of the spiral, seven thematic sectors are distinguished: Ethnography, Culture, Science, Religion, Art, Natural Resources "," Economy, politics, society ". You can study the exposition both sequentially and within a selected sector, using the stairs connecting the levels. The core of the building's interior space is occupied by funds (a special route is provided for acquaintance with them), grouped around the atrium, and all auxiliary and service premises of the museum are concentrated in the underground part of the structure.
The project provides that going up to the upper level on a panoramic elevator, visitors will be able to walk down a gentle ramp from the section of ancient times to the sections of the modern history of the Republic of Kazakhstan. Metaphorically, this journey can be imagined as a descent from mountain peaks into a blooming valley. And, as it turned out, this very precisely corresponds to the ideas of Kazakh experts about the development of their state - the structure of the museum invented by Studio 44 was especially noted by all members of the jury.
