Asymptote was recently awarded
on Honorable Mention in the competition to design a new building
for the Perm Museum in Russia. Asymptote’s design is for a
building with two components – a chromed underside and an
expansive, ebony landscape above – that form a provocative
union of materials. At once an inverter landscape trailing
across the entirety of the site, the building is also a surface
of gesture that moves counter punctually above, two dialectic
terrains that effectively create a singular, powerful object.
Museums, galleries, art houses and halls are all places where
ideas and the temperament of eras present and past are celebrated;
they are also reservoirs of cultural fluxum where materials
are complied, stored, critiqued and made public. The New Perm
Museum is a vessel frozen in time and space, a building that
is motivated and brought to action by art and culture and
the life of the city in which it is situated.
Russian art, from religious icons to abstraction and Constructivism,
has been of remarkable importance at each turn in history,
and the New Perm Museum is representative of this remarkable
legacy and its unpredictable, but assuredly rich, future.
The building envelope is essentially made of two visually
disparate, yet harmonic, materials. The underbelly is a taut,
mirrored, metal surface that reflects and playfully abstracts
the surrounding site and action, while the upper half of the
building is made of lacquered, black, timber that recalls
ancient wooden boxes containing precious metals and objects.
Like Malevich’s Black Square, the upper building envelope
absorbs light and space, creating an aura and presence of
mystical anonymity with the city of Perm as a backdrop.
The building's two components—the chromed underside and the
blanketed, expansive, ebony landscape above—form a provocative
union of materials that serve as a reminder of the importance
of cultural expression and democratic reconciliation. At once
an inverted landscape trailing across the entirety of the
site, the building is also a surface of gesture that moves
counter punctually above, two dialectic terrains that effectively
create a singular, powerful object situated in the city of
Perm. It is an object that will be understood and cherished
as a truly 21st-Century museum, becoming a place that melds
and celebrates the notion of containment and the display of
beauty, ideas, history, polemics and, above all, possibility.
The Perm Museum is conceived as a precious Ark in both its
sweeping, curvilinear design and its function as a container
of precious objects, and has been designed with extreme control
over light, form and spatiality. The building's two aspects,
the under lobe and roofs cape, are separated to allow light,
views and the external and internal worlds to invade one other
through glass that is decorated to meld a chrome and black
surface. In daylight the building is a seamless volume, unified
and solid, and the external views and ambiance invade the
museum's inner sanctums with a high degree of control; light
is essentially "trained" into the public realm within,
implementing a very high level of building intelligence and
performance.
The building assumes an elegant, sculptural presence on its
site and alludes, in a quiet way, to the ancient waterway
nearby. By night the building's "seam" is exposed
and made vivid, and the structure opens to the outside, displaying
its internal world that is kept secret by day. The glass allows
the movement of visitors and the light from the interior galleries,
cafes and shops to all be exposed, thereby animating the building's
exterior. This "crease" in the building's skin is
a deliberate, architectural gesture that acknowledges the
life of the museum as a vital entity of ongoing action, yet
it is also a place that protects and works with the important
cultural patrimony within.
The New Perm Museum will be a state-of-the-art museum that
will also become social, cultural and economically generative
architecture and, like its ancestral Agitprops of the early
part of the last century, a catalyst for thought and provocation
in the wider region and Russia as a whole.
