Strelka Institute: The Latest Architecture and News

In this interview Nadya Nilina, a Russian architect, urban planner and educator specialising in large-scale masterplanning and historical preservation, traces the formation of Russian discourse on urbanism and discusses what goals might be set for the future of urbanisation in the country.

Alongside Prof. Dr. Ronald Wall, Nilina is curating the Urbanisation of Developing Countries course as part of the new Advanced Urban Design programme at Moscow's Strelka Institute, which will provide a detailed critical overview of Russian urban development over the last three hundred years. Urbanisation of Developing Countries is considered one of the key topics in urbanism today and represents a large and complex part of this discussion.

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We are pleased to announce a new content partnership between ArchDaily and Moscow's Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design in which we will share a collection of critical essays, interviews and articles on urban events, studies in urbanism, and urban technologies which are currently taking place in Russia. ArchDaily's Editors will be working closely with those of Strelka Magazine, which was launched in 2014, to translate and publish ideas and opinions from their expert team of local writers.

The Moscow-based Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design and the HSE Graduate School of Urbanism have launched a new collaborative international Masters programme entitled Advanced Urban Design. The two-year English language program, specifically designed for Bachelors, researchers and young professionals, intends to guide students through best practices in the area of urban planning. Under the guidance of a collection of tutors from Russia and around the world, the course aims to investigate conditions of growing cities by focusing on unstable socioeconomic contexts.

Winy Maas is one of architecture’s most aggressive researchers. Through his office MVRDV and affiliations with universities in Europe and America, Maas produces a seemingly unstoppable stream of insights into the environments in which architects now operate. As an advisor to the educational program of the Strelka Institute in Moscow, the architect is currently contributing to the production of eleven radical visions of the future, based on extrapolating trends that shape contemporary life, in Russia and around the world. Maas recently sat with writer, curator, and Strelka faculty member Brendan McGetrick to discuss his unusual educational trajectory, learning from the conservationist Richard Leakey, facing death in Sudan, and the beauty of architects experimenting with algae.

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SVESMI, an unassuming studio based in central Rotterdam, is at the center of a dauntingly complex project that may eventually see the renovation of 448 dilapidated and disused branch libraries in Moscow. Architects Anastassia Smirnova and Alexander Sverdlov balance their time between Rotterdam, which acts as their design studio, and Moscow from which, alongside architects Maria Kataryan and Pavel Rueda, they oversee the project at large. Faced by the potential challenge of reimagining over 450 public 'living rooms' spread across the Russian capital and demanding unusually high levels of spatial articulation and social understanding, the Open Library project is also unwinding the hidden narrative of Moscow’s local libraries.

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Over the course of nine months, graduate students at the Strelka Institute studied the urban landscape of Moscow and the daily routines of its inhabitants, focusing "on new, little-noticed, and as-yet unresolved contradictions." The main goal of the projects was to come up with solutions that could be applied in practice.

The research projects, collectively entitled "Urban Routines," were presented at the end of this past June at the graduate show. Program director David Erixon said that while the theme might seem naive, "when you start looking at seemingly trivial things in a new way they are not so trivial anymore." For details about the individual research projects - covering Cars, Retail, Dwelling, Offices, and Links - keep reading after the break.

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Dutch architect Winy Maas has been selected as the curator for the Strelka Institute’s 2014-2015 academic year. One of the co-founders of Rotterdam-based firm MVRDV, Maas also lectures and teaches all over the world, most recently serving as a visiting professor of architectural design at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and as a professor of architecture and urban design at Delft University of Technology.

With applications closing on the 26th of July, those wishing to apply to the prestigious Strelka Institute in Moscow need to act fast. The Strelka Institute is a non-governmental research institute with a particular focus on the City, using multidisciplinary techniques from fields as varied as sociology, economics, architecture, political and cultural studies. Since 2012, Strelka has been among DOMUS Magazine's top 100 European Schools of Design and Architecture.

Successful applicants will study at the Strelka institute for free, with each student receiving a monthly scholarship to focus on their studies.

More after the break

The Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design in partnership with the Fundació Mies van der Rohe have launched an exciting program of discussions and workshops titled: «Rethinking Europe - European experience in the city development»

The series, which, as part of the Strelka Institute's summer program, will run from the June 30 to July 29, invites representatives from the architectural and urban planning communities of Europe's four largest cities - Amsterdam, Berlin, Barcelona, and London - to discuss how their city's approaches to urban development could be applied to urban territories in Moscow. Learn more about this fantastic series, after the break.