Renzo Piano Building Workshop GES-2, V-A-C Foundation Moscow

The institution devoted to contemporary Russian art has commissioned the Renzo Piano Building Workshop to convert a two-hectare urban site into a cultural centre. GES-2 is now an open-air building site. Forty years after the inauguration of Centre Georges Pompidou, how does one design a “non-museum”?

Paola Nicolin What is GES-2?

Antonio Belvedere It was a power station built between 1904 and 1908 to supply energy for the new Moscow tram system. The building originally had four brick chimneys, later dismantled and rebuilt in steel when the power station switched from coal to gas. The chimneys will be shifted to a different location and given a new life and function. We’re going to turn them into 70-metre-high air intakes to draw in air that’s fresher and cleaner, since the city’s contaminated air layer rises 15 or 20 metres above ground level. So instead of belching out smog and exhaust gases into the sky from the turbines, in future the complex will breathe through them.

PN Here we are in the Red October district, i.e. near the historic Krasny Oktyabr chocolate factory, but also the city’s first pedestrian precinct, with art galleries, restaurants and cultural institutions such as Strelka. This is an island of cultural capital — redistributed and invested in teaching and activities — for the production of interdisciplinary knowledge. Could it be called an island of hybrid education?

AB It perpetuates the power station’s function of producing energy, though now it’s the energy of ideas and no longer electricity. The project also developed by embodying the social and cultural implications. But not merely in terms of aesthetic impact or making great statements. Rather, it was based on an analysis of the social and cultural fabric as well as the urban fabric. In this approach, the client played an important part.

PN Several areas of the project are already clearly legible.