Exhibition "Shukhov. Formula of Architecture" Automatic translate

The A.V. Shchusev State Museum of Architecture together with the Shukhov Tower Foundation presents an international exhibition project, Shukhov. The Formula of Architecture ”, dedicated to the heritage of the outstanding engineer and inventor Vladimir G. Shukhov (1853–1939).

The exhibition will be the largest show of Shukhov’s work over the past twenty-five years and will bring together works from the collections of the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Russian State Academic Artists Museum, the A.V. Shchusev State Museum of Architecture, the Central State Archive of Moscow, the Institute of Lightweight Structures in Stuttgart, and the Museum of Architecture in Munich, the architectural bureau Burkhalter Sumi Architekten in Zurich, etc.

The curators of the project set as their task the study of the engineering method of Shukhov and his contribution to the development of architectural design in Europe. The basis of the exposition is two innovative inventions by Shukhov: steel mesh floors and hyperboloid type structures. The inventions of the author significantly affected the new aesthetics in architecture at the turn of the XIX - XX centuries. Shukhov created a precedent for the synthesis of architecture and engineering, when the design optimality sets the originality of the external form, and the form makes the distribution of loads perceived by the structure visible.

The exposition will include drawings, mock-ups, photographs devoted to the construction of pavilions of the All-Russian Art and Industrial Exhibition of 1896 in Nizhny Novgorod, as well as unique manuscripts of Shukhov himself with calculations and searches for famous designs.

The exhibition will make it possible to trace the evolution of the hyperboloid from numerous variations of openwork water towers to the Shabolovskaya radio tower (1919-1922) and the power transmission line towers of the NIGRES on the Oka (1927-1929).

One of the leading sections of the exhibition is reserved for Shukhov floors. Among the archival materials, a special place is occupied by the patent for the invention of “mesh systems” for covering buildings (1895), which fixes the beginning of the use of spatial metal mesh floors in architecture: hanging with stretched elements and vaulted structures with elements working in compression. The main exhibit in this section is the workshop of a metallurgical plant in Vyksa (1897) with shells of double curvature.

A separate room is dedicated to the oil developments of the engineer who became the ancestor of the oil industry in Russia: oil pipelines, oil storage tanks, the first oil cracking plant and oil barges.

The final hall of the exhibition offers to consider the creative method of Shukhov in the context of modern European engineering design used in architecture. A similar approach is important for curators in terms of determining the place of the Shukhov method in a series of two significant directions in the development of constructive innovations in the twentieth century: lightweight constructions and spatial constructions of linear typical elements.

Within the framework of the exhibition, a 3D film based on photographs of Shukhov will be presented for the first time. The film is the first attempt to cinematically convey Shukhov’s unique work in the art of photography through a kind of visual diary that records the everyday life of Russia at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.

The exposition will occupy 7 halls of the museum’s Enfilade and will present more than 300 objects, many of which will be shown to the public for the first time.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a rich excursion and lecture programs.

Curators of the exhibition: Elena Vlasova, Mark Hakobyan.