A UNESCO designated World Heritage site, Red Square is the historic center of not only Moscow but Russia’s cultural life. In the 1400’s, this city center was a poor, blighted area until Ivan the Great called on Italian architects to help him build the Kremlin, or fortress. This outdoor urban space is now home to St. Basil’s Cathedral, the State Historical Museum, the GUM Department Store and Vladimir Lenin’s mausoleum. St. Basil’s is one of the most recognizable buildings in Russia due to it’s unique domes, towers, cupolas, spires and arches. Some of the best Russian history and art lives behind the distinctive red brick walls of the State Historical Museum. The GUM Department Store makes Red Square a luxuriant shopping destination. In it’s lifetime, the Square has hosted innumerable speeches, parades, rock concerts and festivals.
Drones help us see architecture in new ways. Explore Moscow, Georgia, St. Petersberg, and Russian supertall skyscraper Lakhta Center through Timelab’s lense. With the help of drones, Timelab Production’s vimeo profile showcases a wide variety of professional video content. Travel to new places (and new heights) from the comfort of your own home by watching the videos below.
Moscow welcomed its first new park in 50 years with the opening Zaryadye Park in mid-September. Designed by architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Citymakers and Hargreaves Associates, this new public space has been a big draw for Muscovites, with over a million people visiting in the first weeks since its inauguration.
The park has become one of the most important contemporary spaces in Moscow, exhibiting high-quality infrastructure and landscapes, as well as extraordinary views to the Kremlin and the Red Square.
As part of the series of new urban developments sprawling up in Moscow, Zaryadye Park is the latest to open this month in a bid to improve the city’s green space. Commissioned by Moscow Chief Architect, Sergey Kuznetsov, an international consortium led by Diller Scofidio + Renfro in collaboration with Hargreaves Associates and Citymakers has designed this new public space that encourages integration and celebrates the amplitude of regions across Russia by artificially emulating each of their climates: the steppe, the forest, the wetlands and the tundra.
Kleinewelt Architekten in partnership with Citizenstudio / Gorozhane Group, created a re-design proposal for the Northern River Boat Station Park, also known as the Park of Five Seas, in Moscow. Built in the 1930’s, the current park is supposed to act as the city’s gateway to the five seas: the White, Baltic, Black, Azov, and Caspian Sea. However, the park is removed from city life and separates Moscow from it’s historic waterways.
The New Normal, a three year-long educational programme at Moscow's Strelka Institute of Architecture, Media and Design, is focused on "the opportunities posed by emerging technologies for interdisciplinary design practices." In this short essay, taken from a new book of the same name, course director Benjamin Bratton lays out the thesis behind the project.
Something has shifted, it seems. We are making new worlds faster than we can keep track of them, and the pace is unlikely to slow. If our technologies have advanced beyond our ability to conceptualize their implications, such gaps can be perilous. In response, one impulse is to pull the emergency brake and to try put all the genies back in all the bottles. This is ill-advised (and hopeless).
Better instead to invest in emergence, in contingency: to map the new normal for what it is, and to shape it toward what it should be.
In this article, originally published by Strelka Magazine and translated into English by Alexandra Tumarkina, Anton Khitrov sits down with Julia Ardabyevskaya to analyse the urban environment and spectacular world that the blockbuster movie Ghost in the Shell creates.
Ghost in the Shell, a new sci-fi blockbuster starring Scarlett Johansson, is based on a 1992 manga comic and a more famous 1995 anime adaptation. In the film, humans are presented as obsessed with high-tech prosthetics, spending vast amounts of money on “self-improvement”. The story proceeds to show that the next step for humanity will be complete robotization; this new generation of human machines is represented by the movie's heroine – a female cyborg with an organic brain but a synthetic body. The action takes place in a futuristic city in which almost every surface is covered in holograms the size of a skyscraper, each and every one an advertisement.
Russian architecture firm AI-Architects has been selected as the winners of a competition to design the new Sheremetyevskaya Metro Station in Moscow, Russia. The open international competition sought proposals for three stations to be located along the capital’s new metro line: "Rzhevskaya," "Sheremetyevskaya," and "Stromynka." The other two winning firms included Blank Architects for the “Rzhevskaya” station and Map Architects for the "Stromynka" station.
Russian architecture office Blank Architects have won a competition to design the Rzhevskaya Metro Station in Moscow, Russia. The open international competition searched for proposals to design three stations along the capital’s new metro line: "Rzhevskaya," "Sheremetyevskaya," and "Stromynka." Blank Architects is one of three architecture offices winning proposals for each station, with AI Architects chosen to design "Sheremetyevskaya" station and Map Architects winning "Stromynka." Designed as a sequence of arches and topped with a transparent pavilion, the proposal creates a dialogue between monumental and light elements - a modern addition to the city’s architectural identity.
