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.
The project began in 2012 with an idea formulated between the part-Dutch-part-Russian practice SVESMI, urban designer Paola Viganò, and a Muscovite bibliophile described as an ‘island of literary independence’ called Boris Kupriyanov (of Falanster). Sverdlov and Kupriyanov took the lead, assisted by a group of thirty-five multidisciplinary minds engaged in the production of a provocative research document which boldly called for the restoration of Moscow’s vast network of small-scale libraries. This field research was followed by the thesis of Giovanni Bellotti and Paolo Ruaro, under the supervision of Paola Viganò and Alexander Sverdlov, at the Università IUAV di Venezia. The foremost goal of this research as a whole was to explore what libraries were, are and should be in order to prove that a dose of fresh ambition could shock the system into rapid reform.
