Two projects, two firms of international architecture, to give new identity to Moscow city. The Renzo Piano Building Workshop and Zaha Hadid Architects have been selected to design, respectively, the new V-A-C Foundation cultural site and Sberbank Technopark, that will be the next cultural and technological pole of the Russian capital.
The main building of new V-A-C Foundation site to be revived and redesigned is the GES2 power station, situated in the popular Red October district of the city.
Built between 1904 and 1907, the GES2 power station will now be re-imagined as cultural desitnation, offering new opportunities for artists and audiences.
RPBW will recuperate the original structure, entrance and façade of the power station and to insert a fluid and visible, web-like building-scale device into it. The result will be a legible and well-defined square of 150 by 150 square metres, organised into four main poles: The Civic pole, the Welcoming pole, the Exhibitions pole and the Education pole.
The extensive Civic and Welcoming poles will be free access areas, featuring an outdoor sculptural garden with a forest of birch trees and an outdoor / indoor piazza; the area will include a library, bookshop, amenities such as a café, snack bar and restaurant as well as an auditorium and permanent and temporary art installations.
The main galleries situated in the Exhibitions pole will be of varied and flexible dimensions, adaptable to accommodate multiple media forms and installation designs. The Education pole will permanently house V-A-C’s annual Curatorial Summer School.
To make the experience as friendly as possible, RPBW aims to develop the entire space in a clear and legible way; but not only: to make the centre environmentally friendly, the existing chimneys will not only remain part of the city’s skyline, they will become indispensable sustainable devices for the site’s natural ventilation and reduced energy consumption.
Zaha Hadid Architects signes the Sberbank Technopark project. The 131,000-square-metre of the area will become the cradle of IT innovations, accomodating the 10/12,000 people working in Sberbank’s information technology and marketing departments (Sberbank is the market leader of the Russian banking and economic system).
The recognizable fluid style of the Queen of Architecture characterizes also this creation, that will be developed to host laboratories and campuses of russia’s growing IT, biomedical, energy, nuclear and space innovations.
Both of projects are expected to be completed in 2019.
