Polytechnic Museum will Turn into a Major Event Venue
Two courtyards of the Polytechnic Museum will be covered with a transparent roof, in the Southern one a children’s museum will be created, and the Northern yard will host a concert hall. A special design with rotating lamellas that provide high-quality sound will make it possible to hold concerts of a high level of complexity. This was told by Chief Architect of Moscow Sergey Kuznetsov.
On the plan, the Polytechnic building has a shape of figure-eight with two courtyards that will be covered with glass atriums with a frame made of aviation aluminum.
«In the Southern courtyard there are three small houses with a different number of floors. All the inner space will be completely given to children of different ages. Visitors will be able to leave the children under the supervision of museum staff and go to see the exhibition. And the large empty Northern courtyard will turn into an event venue that will be important for the museum and the whole city. The sound quality will be very high. This can be achieved owing to an interesting design — a system of screens of 6-7 meters high, encircling the entire yard. They have rotating lamellas that pick up sound and drown it out. When you need to adjust the scene to a specific event, the sound is tuned with the help of this system» — said Sergey Kuznetsov.
The ceilings of the concert venue will be 36 meters high. The renewed museum will be able to receive 2 million people a year, which is about 6 thousand visitors a day.
«While working on the space of the Northern Courtyard, we were faced with the following phenomenon — brick walls covered with a glass dome create a strong echo, which is unacceptable for a high-quality venue. But since we are dealing with an architectural monument, we cannot just coat everything with plaster. As a result, we came up with a system of screens with rotating lamellas. According to the concept, the lamellas will be located at a distance from the walls, and at official events it will be possible to fully open the facades» - explained Mikhail Kozlov, head of the Wowhaus design team.
Most of the interiors are exposition spaces, not the usual exhibits where people just walk around and look at them. There are a huge number of projections, multimedia, and interactive things. An exposition of this kind requires a different approach to the design of premises in general, and therefore in the renewed Polytechnic Museum there will be more dark spaces than light ones. When working with historical elements, architects tried to keep everything that was left in its original form. A careful restoration of the historical decor is underway. New elements do not try to pretend they are old ones, they are just painted in a single color. As a result, visitors will have a clear understanding of what is authentic and what is modern.
«In general, the main background is brick, which was carefully cleaned of numerous layers of plaster. All exhibition halls will be quite simple and concise. A frame system with integrated ventilation grilles and shading systems will be built. Just now you get an impression of the facades of the museum and the new pedestrian zone, which was opened on May 4 by Mayor Sergey Sobyanin. The Polytech will fully open its doors to visitors at the end of 2020» — Sergey Kuznetsov added.
Let us recollect that the restoration of the Polytechnic Museum is carried out by Polytechstroy, a structural unit of DOM.RF, a financial institution for the development. The project is realized on the bases of historical and archival photographs and measurement drawings. The Wowhaus is working on the design of the exhibition spaces. They also designed the park with an amphitheater and a pedestrian zone, part of which was the «cold» gallery on the lower level of the museum. APEX Project Bureau prepares documents for engineering systems.
