The exhibition itself opened last week, and yesterday, September 20, the projects of the finalists of the competition were presented to journalists by the director of the Polytechnic Museum Boris Saltykov and a member of the Expert Council, architecture critic Grigory Revzin. Having told in detail about each of the four concepts, they emphasized that the participants of the international competition (its consultant was the Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design) did not develop the final versions of the museum's reconstruction, but only preliminary scenarios that would help the Polytechnic management to choose as a general designer. and the strategy of further development itself. Such a clause turned out to be more than appropriate, since all the projects presented are radical and raise questions - from banal compliance with protection legislation to the fundamental possibility of implementation.
Thus, the Japanese Naoko Kawamura & Junya Ishugami (together with ARUP) proposed to "dig" under the museum by about 4 meters, partially revealing its foundation and breaking a park in this area. It is assumed that the green spaces will partly "splash out" outside, forming a picturesque square around the museum building, which will house exhibits - mechanisms and units that are not afraid of precipitation and direct sunlight. The architects propose to leave the historical building itself unchanged, protecting it from above with a special overlap, which looks like glass on visualizations, but is actually conceived in the form of a kind of film that can change its shape depending on the strength and direction of the wind. On the one hand, the involvement of such constructive and engineering virtuosos as ARUP in the project should guarantee its feasibility, but experts do not hide the fact that the proposal to use an unknown material confuses them very much. “Moscow is not the most suitable city for inventions and daring experiments,” says Grigory Revzin.
And if the Japanese decided to connect the museum with the city with the help of a park with lush vegetation (the creation of such connections was one of the prerequisites of the technical assignment), then the architectural studio "Studio 44" actually turns the Polytechnic into a giant interchange hub. The architects propose to combine the underground level of the museum by passages with the two nearest metro stations at once - "Lubyanka" and "Kuznetskiy most". According to the authors, you cannot imagine a simpler and more logical way to include a cultural institution in the active life of the city. The courtyards of the Studio 44 building are proposed to be covered with translucent domes and turned into the “City of Innovations” (southern courtyard) and “Innovation Square” (northern courtyard) - each of these spaces can be used both for placing exhibitions and for holding mass cultural events. The architects are turning the existing pits along the facades of the Polytechnic into covered passages that will unite the street space with the basement and first floors of the museum. Quite decisively, the authors of the project also deal with the internal space - the "layers" of the Soviet era (that is, almost all internal walls) are supposed to be demolished, which, of course, will create a unique exhibition space, which the museum does not have now, but will inevitably raise a lot of questions from the organs protection of monuments. Experts do not really like the idea of uniting the museum with the metro - it is not clear how to ensure the safety of a cultural institution and its collection, if it is available to the entire passenger traffic of the metropolitan subway.
Two other projects - the American bureau Leeser Architecture (it was invited to participate in the competition at the last moment to replace David Chipperfield, who rejected the rejection) and the Russian-Dutch team Neutelings Riedijk Architecten and Project Meganom - offer to build on the Polytechnic building with one additional floor made of transparent materials. Thomas Lieser, whose Russian co-author is Mikhail Khazanov, grows crystal structures above each of the courtyards, and the main facade of the building is decorated with a giant inscription "Technical Museum". The latter, obviously, should be considered the implementation of one more mandatory clause of the TK, which prescribed to emphasize the scientific and technical themes of the museum by means of architecture and design. True, the requirement not to distort in any way the historical appearance of the building, built in the pseudo-Russian style, was obviously neglected by the architects.
In the Neutelings Riedijk Architecten project and the Meganom Project, the additional floor is designed as an independent volume soldered into the body of the historical complex. It is a kind of glass airship or torpedo, as Grigory Revzin called it, suspended at the level of the roof of an existing building. It will be possible to hold exhibitions, fairs, large-scale concerts and film screenings - according to the authors of the project, such a space with a panoramic view of the entire Moscow center cannot but be in demand. But the architects propose to make the courtyards of the museum accessible from the street, and the space of the first floor, which will thus turn into a city-wide arcade, should be given to partners of the museum - technical companies and scientific institutes - to demonstrate inventions and new technologies.
It should be noted that the very idea of creating a transparent floor, from which one can look at the city from above, seems very attractive to experts. If we talk about the ways to implement it, then, according to Grigory Revzin, Thomas Lieser's version seems more realistic - the proposal of the Dutch-Russian team confuses criticism with excessive constructive complexity (the "torpedo" has only one fulcrum). On the direct question of whether there is an undisputed leader among the four submitted projects, Revzin just shook his head: each of the concepts raises many questions and needs improvement. However, in a sense, this is exactly how it should be: now the Polytechnic is holding a competition of ideas, and it has at least a year in reserve in order to concretize the one that seems to be the most advantageous to the jury. The winner of the competition will be determined at a meeting of the Museum's Board of Trustees on September 29.
