Two years after the British architect Norman Foster quit the project, the expansion of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts is back on track.Construction of the new building is due to start in 2016, the museum’s director Marina Loshak said on Monday, 6 April, at a press conference in Moscow.The 20,000-square-metre extension, which will include galleries, restoration studios and storage, will be linked to the Pushkin’s historic building by an underground passageway, to be completed in 2019.
The new building is part of a major reorganisation that will see the Moscow institution transformed into a vast complex called “Museum Town”, made up of nine buildings linked by pedestrian-only streets. After the departure of Norman Foster, the project was handed over in 2013 to the architecture firm Project Meganom, led by Yuri Grigorian.
The Museum Town campus will include the Neo-Classical Soulovy mansion, which will undergo restoration starting in June, to be turned into a library with reading rooms and exhibition spaces. Meanwhile, the 100,000-strong collection of art and objects currently stored in the mansion will be transferred to the Pushkin’s purpose-built Museum of Private Collections, founded by the collector Ilya Silberstein and opened in 1994. Unfortunately, that building is due to partially close to the public until 2019, while its permanent displays of donated collections are reorganised for the Museum Town project.
