Project for the Vkhutemas museum in Moscow

The city is, not only an organism, but above all, a “slow construction”, a “great architecture”, and a “deposit of efforts”. It can change over time but with some inertia and sudden accelerations. The city is built through fixed points, parts and gaps, in a strict relationship with the forms of the earth, the geography and pieces of nature. In this sense, Moscow is a clear example of radio-centric city crossed by a river, from which it takes its name, that, at the territorial scale, is innervated of green wedges that reach the center. The Gorky Park represents the head of a wider natural corridor that gradually opens to the south following the river bend up to Passeri hill. For this urban part, in the consultation for the project of the Vkhutemas museum – proposed by PhD course in architectural composition of the IUAV of Venice –, a set of analytical methods and techniques was developed aiming at understanding the morphological characters of the study area. The canonical investigations on the formal, geomorphological characteristics of the natural system and fabrics have been placed side by side spatial analyses and “exercises of measurement” as a specific and fertile ways of knowing places, fabrics and urban facts, the relationship between primary elements, through already known forms. The known urban systems, their figural structure, can verify in re the possibilities of renewal of the urban form and of the increasingly consistent city-nature relationship, between urban compositions and open spaces. A method and a technique that call into question the analogue thinking, in addition to the logical one, as the trigger of the invention but also as a specific way of knowing.