The New Jerusalem Museum, which is rightfully considered one of the richest collections in the Moscow Region, needs a new building not only and not so much because it has outgrown the existing storage facility. The main reason for the upcoming move is political: the construction of the complex will allow the museum to be removed from the territory of the Resurrection New Jerusalem Monastery, which was transferred to the Russian Orthodox Church in 2009.
The site for the construction of the building, into which more than 170 thousand units of museum exhibits will move, was allocated on the territory of the village of Nikulino, just 300 meters from the northern wall of the monastery. From the east, the site is bordered by a road, from the south - by the coastal and water protection zone of Istra, and its territory is a gentle slope of one of the hills on the right bank of the river that surrounds the monastery like an amphitheater. In fact, the future museum turned out to be sandwiched between two zones of strict restrictions - on the one hand, only 300 meters away there is a world-famous architectural monument, the view of which cannot be distorted, and on the other, a river that can flood and makes the soil very capricious. The architects of City-Arch faced the most difficult task of creating a complex that would harmonize with the monastery and at the same time be strong enough and resistant to possible floods.
As the authors themselves say, the search for the optimal compositional solution was carried out throughout the year; in total, more than 20 project options were developed. “At first, the situation seemed to us completely hopeless, since the maximum level of water rise is 11.5 meters, and the height of the newly erected volume should not exceed 10 meters in this zone,” recalls Valery Lukomsky. “At the same time, we had to design a building with an area of 28 thousand square meters, which we could not bury in the ground due to the threat of flooding!” In order to find a way out, the architects made their own landscape-visual analysis, identifying the key viewpoints of the monastery and the sector in which a new building can be built without compromising the panorama. It was in this sector that the conditional volume of the future museum was inscribed - at first, the architects operated with a parallelepiped, after adjusting to the visual corridors, it acquired the shape of a prism oriented along the east-west axis, then the authors pulled the edge of it towards the road and the opposite one to the ground. - this provided an even softer entry of the new volume into the existing panorama.
“We very quickly came to the understanding that no matter how much you offer, it will contrast with the monastery. There were more interesting combinations, there were less, but in all cases the new building looked like a foreign body in the existing panorama. And then we realized that we need to follow the path of creating not a self-sufficient structure, but rather a landscape object,”says Valery Lukomsky. In general, the roof, which took the form of a ramp, asked to be exploited - the architects plant greenery on it and thereby disguise it as part of the existing slope. The outer slopes of the embankment, which surrounds the entire building, will also be planted to protect it in case of flooding. Probably, this artificial hill would inevitably turn out to be too big if the architects decided the building in the form of a single volume. But the authors followed the logic of the distribution of human streams moving from the river to the monastery, as well as the functional program, and divided the complex into two wings. They turned out to be different both in area and in content: in the left, closest to the monastery, public functions are concentrated - a conference hall, a center for children's creativity, a cafe, in the right one there is a fund storage, restoration workshops, a library. Such a division will allow not to limit the museum's activities to a single mission of exhibiting and storing valuables - in fact, City-Arch has designed a multifunctional cultural complex, some parts of which can operate autonomously. This is relevant both from the point of view of the organization of research work (the scientists working with the exhibits will not be disturbed by visitors), and from the point of view of banal security (the center of attraction of visitor activity is as far away from the storage as possible).
The architects spread the volumes at an angle of 30 degrees in such a way that the larger right wing is located almost perpendicular to the road, and the smaller left one deviates from it and turns out to be parallel to the monastery wall. According to Valery Lukomsky, such a composition made it possible, at the level of the general plan, to emphasize the subordination of the new volume to the architectural monument. In addition, having split into two wings, the building acquired a dynamic image - the gate facing the road attracts the eye and as if invites inside. The expression of the funnel is greatly enhanced by the gallery of a round courtyard that unites the buildings - a giant bowl cut into a man-made hill.
From the outside, this element seems to be a self-sufficient volume, which the architects cleverly disguised in the folds of the terrain. But in fact, the bowl, lined with sheets of maroon copper on the outside, does not have a bottom - an arch is carved into it at the ground level from the entrance side, and its walls are formed by observation platforms and galleries connecting the buildings with the entrance area and the operated roof. What is actually well camouflaged are the side facades of both buildings, which have stained-glass glazing and window openings, covered with overhangs and roof cut-outs. And in order to emphasize the man-made hill, the architects in a special way decorate the walls of the passage carved in it to the inner round square. The vertical section of the created embankment was assembled from fragments of the "cultural layer" of the adjacent territory - plinths, rubble stone, bricks, concrete with inserts of ceramic tiles, so characteristic of the New Jerusalem Monastery. Forming the space for the entrance to the museum, this wall in itself promises to become a spectacular exhibit, but the main thing is that such a "fictitious archeology" encourages visitors to meet with the collection of the New Jerusalem Museum.
When designing a new large-scale volume in the immediate vicinity of the architectural monument, the authors were able to find a very non-standard compromise solution. Their building is a virtuoso snag: what looks like a volume is actually an inner square, and what is perceived as part of the landscape turns out to be full-fledged museum buildings. The only thing that causes serious concern in all this is how such a plan will be implemented in Russian conditions. Will not only an elegant design solution turn out to be an unbearable task for domestic construction technologies? We will receive the answer to this question already in 2014.
