In general, the Polytechnic Museum has a record number of problems: both the exhibition halls and the technical equipment of the complex need updating, parking is urgently needed, the question of updating the exposition itself has long been ripe, but perhaps the most painful issue is its place and role in the city, and also the layout of the building itself. The fact is that the famous building in the neo-Russian style is actually three houses created at different times by different architects (the central part - 1877, architect I. A. Monighetti; the southern wing - 1883-1896, architect N. A Shokhin; northern wing - 1903-1907, architects V. I. Ermishantsev, V. V. Voeikov) and, by and large, are not connected with each other. The communication between the volumes is so imperfect (it is enough to give such an eloquent example: the main front staircase "slips" past the second floor) that often in order to get from one part of the museum to another, it is necessary to leave one entrance and walk down the street to another. Can a cultural institution develop normally in such conditions and provide visitors with full-fledged excursion programs? In the opinion of Nikita Yavein, the answer is obvious, so the architects paid close attention to the solution of this issue in their reconstruction project. The second most important aspect is the island location of the Polytechnic Museum in the city. As you know, on all four sides it is bounded by rather active routes in terms of traffic (from the south-west - by Novaya Ploshchad Street, from the north-west - by Polytechnichesky proezd, from the north-east - by Lubyanskiy proezd and from the southeast - by the Ilyinsky gate square), which makes it far from the most accessible museum in the capital, and the architects also tried to fix this problem.
The most radical change in the structure of the Polytech, proposed by Studio 44, is to link the spaces of the basement floor of the museum (at -4.200) with exits from the two nearest metro stations - Lubyanka and Kitay-gorod. This idea gave many critics a reason to compare a cultural institution with a transfer hub, but, strictly speaking, such a metaphor is not entirely correct: the museum will not be connected with the metro as such, but only with those exits that lead to the Polytechnic (the least populated of all, by the way). The authors of the project propose to organize a through passage along the basement of the building along the line of pits located along the perimeter of the courtyards of the building. And in the part of the sidewalk adjacent to the carriageway of New Square, it is proposed to cover the pits with transparent caps - thanks to this, the museum will have new, street, showcases to demonstrate certain achievements of science and technology, which, in turn, will become an advertisement for the main exposition.
In order to unite the buildings of the museum into a single whole and give visitors the opportunity to continuously walk around the exposition, it was proposed to equip the central part of the building “Studio 44” with a system of escalators and gently sloping travelators. Naturally, this kind of innovation is impossible without partial internal redevelopment - the architects tried to find a compromise between the needs of the building and the need to comply with security legislation, proposing to disassemble the interfloor floors while preserving all the vaulted and arched structures. But the authors propose to replace the roof over the travolators with a translucent one (preserving the original configuration), as a result of which this part of the building will turn into a central atrium - the communication core of the museum, which is simply not in its structure today.
The famous courtyards of the Polytechnic University are, of course, also being transformed. Their "Studio 44" quite predictably turns into covered atriums, covering the courtyards with translucent structures. The attic spaces, in turn, are transformed into an attic, where, according to the project, after reconstruction, the library, the Innovation Center and the audience of the Educational Center could be accommodated. Interestingly, it is the converted courtyards in Yavein's project that become the main public spaces of the museum. In order to emphasize their new status, the authors of the project give them sonorous names - "City of Innovations" (formerly southern courtyard) and "Square of innovations" (formerly northern courtyard). The first is covered with a folded glass roof, under which greenhouse plants are planted on the roofs of the courtyard wings, the flat roof of the second has the ability to move to the middle of the courtyard, which will allow not only organizing an open-air show, but also delivering large exhibition objects to the museum. At the same time, the surface of the "Innovation Square" can be transformed into an amphitheater, and the courtyard facades facing it are equipped with panoramic elevators and special mobile volumes that can serve as both theater boxes and showcases for exhibits.
The Studio 44 project also provides for a number of restoration measures, including clearing the basement floor from late layers, opening the closed entrances to the building, restoring the rafter system and embedded skylights. Reconstruction of the interior of the Big Auditorium of the Lecture Hall of the Polytechnic Museum for the period of the beginning of the twentieth century and restoration of the main staircase are also envisaged. True, the communication role of the historic main staircase is supposed to be limited: in the concept of Studio 44, it leads only to the Innovation Center, the Educational Center and the library, while its marches turn into the front halls of open access library collections. It should be noted that with such a detailed restoration program, the project of Nikita Yavein's team stood out very favorably from all the other concepts that participated in the competition, the authors of which focused mainly on the design of expositions and a general change in the image of the museum.
“Since the inclusion of new architecture is contraindicated for the monument, we decided to limit ourselves to introducing only mechanisms into the building, that is, various technological elements that would facilitate the existence of the museum and at the same time form a kind of installation of works of engineering art,” says the architect. By mechanisms, Yavein also means the already mentioned travelators with lifts and mobile theater boxes, and, for example, a telescopic crane, which not only allows the delivery of large-sized exhibits to the courtyard of the museum (which is quite spectacular in itself), but also becomes, according to the authors, a kind of "horizontal Ferris wheel". “In general, from the appearance of this neo-Russian-style building, it is extremely difficult to guess that the Polytechnic Museum is located inside it, therefore, introducing mechanisms into the project, including such large-sized ones as a crane,” continues Yavein, “we tried to create a system of“advertising”objects attracting attention to the museum and telling about its inner content”. Interestingly, several missiles were to become another such "advertising" object - the architects proposed to install "VOSTOK-1" in the center of Lubyanskaya Square (anyway, the place for the monument is vacant), and in Ilyinsky Square to "sprout" out of the ground a little more modern models of spaceships.
