Like almost all Russian architectural bureaus, Sergey Estrin's studio took part in the competition for the design of the new building of the National Center for Contemporary Art not with a qualification application, but with a specially developed sketch concept of the museum. This project was not selected for the second round, but for the architect it became not only an interesting professional task, but also the result of difficult reflections on the site itself and the purpose of the future museum, and that is why Sergey Estrin decided to make it public.
“Frankly, one of the reasons for publication for me was a recent interview with Sergei Skuratov, in which he said that he had made a decision for himself not to participate in the competition for the new building of the NCCA, because he considers the place where it is supposed to be built to be extremely controversial,” says Sergey Estrin. “I have similar feelings towards the site - Khodynskoye field in its current form seems to me very unsuitable for a museum, so in our project we tried to find a compromise between a reverent cultural institution and a very aggressive urban environment.”
Let us recall that the complex, which should become the main national center for the display and study of all manifestations of contemporary art, will be built on the Khodynskoye Pole. In parallel with the NCCA, several more facilities are being designed and built at once, including two hotel and office complexes, a shopping and entertainment center, a park on the site of the former runway, and a new metro station. Most of the questions from this list are caused by the shopping and entertainment center - a huge structure (its developer proudly promises the largest object of this type in Europe), facing the future museum not even by the entrance, but by the loading area with two wide ramps. And although the competition task allowed the design of a fairly high object (up to 170 meters), Sergey Estrin considered for himself that the creation of another high-rise in this case was not an option. “Firstly, the town-planning landscape of Khodynka already consists of such verticals, and adding one more to them, in my opinion, is pointless, especially since against the background of an extended shopping and entertainment center under construction, even a very multi-storey volume is at risk of being lost. And secondly, and this is important for me, the museum cannot and should not enter into unpromising competition with a shopping and entertainment complex, it should not be a shopping mall, entertainment for those who did not have time to watch an action movie."
The reluctance to enter into a direct dialogue with the commercial colossus and create a kind of screen for it prompted the architect to the idea of burying the museum building into the ground. Of course, it could have been hidden altogether, but then it would hardly have been able to attract visitors, so Estrin decided to make not an invisible object, but a volume placed in a kind of shell, capable, by leveling the nearest town-planning environment, to create a self-sufficient environment around the museum. consonant with the theme of contemporary art. In fact, the architect lowers the entire area allocated for the construction of the NCCA by 24 meters below ground level, creating a kind of canyon on the border of the former runway. In the middle of this space is the actual museum volume - elongated and oblong, with sloping "sides" and "head" raised towards the future metro station. Several pedestrian bridges are thrown over its roof, which are designed to connect the mall and the future park, and the gaps remaining between the building and the walls of the "gorge" were used to organize a circular walking route, once on which, for a while, you seem to completely disappear from modern Moscow. Creation of an atmosphere radically different from the aura of Khodynka and the frantic rhythm of the capital as a whole, perhaps, was the main task of Estrin in this project, who believes that alternative reality is the essence of contemporary art, the field on which his heroes work. “It has been in an oppositional, underground state for so long that even now, despite the increased prosperity and tourist activity of the population, interest in national contemporary art is only slightly flickering,” the architect believes. "And the image of the NCCA that we have invented reflects this: contemporary art in Russia is only trying to" crawl out "to the surface of life."
The outer walls of the canyon, whose width reaches 20 meters, were supposed to be finished with rough concrete or rough stone, the bottom was interpreted as frozen lava, and the facades of the museum itself were covered with material resembling leather or thin scales. By the way, this skin is not perfect - in some places it is spreading and literally bursting at the seams - the architect wanted in this way to emphasize the ambiguity of the very concept of "contemporary art". Numerous craters are also made in the body of the "whale" - windows that will allow you to look inside the museum and, possibly, will intrigue those who initially did not even go to the exhibitions. In the center of the roof, next to the widest bridge in the park, the architect proposed to make an open amphitheater, and to move the restoration workshops into a separate volume, which, like a stalactite, builds up on the wall of the "gorge" opposite from the park at the widest point of the latter.
Above the ground, the "miracle fish" rises by only 3-4 meters and due to its plastic and textured cladding is visually perceived not as a building, but rather as a landscape object, an organic generation and continuation of the park being created here, which is especially clearly visible on the master plan … Sergey Estrin was striving for exactly this effect, believing that, given the too close location to the shopping and entertainment center, a building of any other configuration and plastic will inevitably look like its “branch”. That is why the architect did not begin to redo his project after an additional item appeared in the competition project about the impossibility of using the underground space. “We decided that we would leave the concept in this form and thereby indicate our attitude to the very idea of building a national museum on the outskirts of a shopping and entertainment complex,” says Estrin. “There was a chance that they would listen to our opinion, as it seemed to me, but, alas, this did not happen.”
