In winter 2017, the MMOMA Education Center opened on the site of the Moscow Museum of Modern Art in Yermolaevsky Pereulok, 17. The creation of such a center has become a logical development of the museum’s activities in the field of education and the popularization of modern art, which allows consolidating and expanding the existing educational projects of the Museum.
The project did not imply a global rework of the internal space. The museum building is an architectural monument of the twentieth century, and it was impossible to completely change it. We proposed to remove some, in our opinion, unnecessary elements inside, expanded the windows, made the space of the ground floor visible, literally transparent, from the street. The architectural solution corresponds to the objectives of the Education Center - to be open to every visitor.
On the first floor, the focus has shifted from the stairs to the 'wings' - now there is a MMOMA Kids children's area and a museum cafe with a shop. For the library on the 2nd floor, we designed furniture, offered a special lighting.The exhibition space on the 3rd and 4th floors has practically not changed: the halls remained as free as possible and at the same time 'flexible' for artistic solutions. On the fifth, where lectures, conferences and master classes will be held, we created mobile partitions that will allow changing the space depending on the objectives of the event. The symbol of space and elements uniting it is a huge luminous sphere on the central staircase and dozens of spheres of different sizes at the entrance, in the library and on all floors of the center. We decided that the accents and highlights in space should be made not by color, but by texture and natural materials. On the vertical wall of the staircase, which, like an artery, passes through all the floors, a metal panel appeared that hides the office space.