Learning from Luga

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Learning from Luga

Moscow, Russia

The Pushinksy Cinema, a surviving example of a prolific generation of post-war Russian modernism, has been diminished over the past 50 years by adaptations to its majestic base and elegant glass façade - devices which once enabled the Cinema’s upscale interior to connect visually and symbolically with the vibrant life of Pushkin Square. Today, the Pushinsky requires foremost that this relationship between the Cinema and the Square be ameliorated – not by giving the building’s façade a new expression, but by spatially and programmatically extending the Cinema’s interior deeper into the Square. This project proposes the restoration of the cinema’s original glass curtain wall - effectively returning the Pushinsky to a building without a façade - and the installation of two parallel structures which flank the grand stair and spill into the Square. These structures are designed as assemblies of densely aggregated, durable plastic components, modulated to accommodate varied programming along their lengths – bulges, turns, and apertures, which respond to and engage the urban conditions around the site. The component-based nature of the proposal draws on the sophisticated craft traditions of the Russian North as a tectonic precedent of both figuration and aggregation, deployed here as an antipole to the Pushinsky in the form of a façade without a building – a structure, at times inhabitable, which is never thick enough to be considered a building nor thin enough to be construed as merely a surface.

Exhibited in “RUMBLE”, Los Angeles (2011)