GES-2

Maria Antonietta Santangelo

The VAC Foundation drew on the design experience of Renzo Piano and his RPBW for the GES-2 project to convert a former power plant into a museum center. The building will be a new center for contemporary culture in Moscow, re-channeling the innovative character that the power plant had when it was built around 1904-1908.
The site plan configuration is dictated first and foremost by the desire to create an intuitive environment where visitors can orient themselves anywhere through a network of circulation, excluding no space from the route. Its functional spaces are configured around four large hubs, including the entrance, the covered square, the exhibition center, and the School of Art. Like in a city, the square is the true center of the museum, a place for numerous social and community activities, and a large garden is on the roof for outdoor shows and installations.

The exhibition center hosts temporary and permanent exhibitions with a flexible approach, which can be adapted to varied settings, and the classrooms of the new School of Art were designed to train the next generation of curators, artists, and art historians. RPBW’s design also involved restoring four existing high brick chimneys, turning them into devices to capture clean air at a height of more than 70 meters, making them essential elements for a sustainable and conscious approach to architecture, increasingly integrating nature into the built world, the mark of the architect’s meticulous ten-year research.
The GES-2 in Moscow, under construction, will become a spatial sculpture that brings together an inner cultural dimension with a social urban dimension as well as technological innovation with historical value.