Location: Russia, Moscow

Address: st. Vozdvizhenka, 5/25, Moscow

Building style: Classicism

Museum website: muar.ru

In 1934, a closed museum appeared in Moscow at the Academy of Architecture of the USSR. It is housed in the Donskoy Monastery. The first exhibition of the museum consisted of fragments of destroyed monuments standing in the open air. The buildings of the monastery and the preserved necropolis of the 18th-19th centuries also became part of it.

After the Great Patriotic War, the Republican Museum of Russian Architecture was opened in the Talyzin estate on Vozdvizhenka – a public museum, a research center for architecture and urban planning. At the same time, at the suggestion of the director – Shchusev – objects of Soviet architecture also got into the collection. The estate, a monument of classicism of the 18th century, built by Matvey Kazakov, became an exhibit of the museum, like the Donskoy Monastery for the museum at the Academy. In 1964, two museums of architecture were merged.

In 1991, the Donskoy Monastery was returned to the Russian Orthodox Church. The Museum of Architecture was urgently sent to Vozdvizhenka, to the Talyzins’ estate, which by that time was in a state close to emergency. Due to lack of space, the permanent exhibition had to be closed.

The museum was saved by David Sargsyan, who headed it in 2000 and turned the forgotten cultural object into an innovative institution. He preserved the historical interiors of the Talyzin estate, changed the abbreviation GNIMA to MUAR. The museum did not have money to reconstruct the outbuilding of the estate, and then the director came up with the idea of turning it into a special exhibition space – “Ruin”. Already after the death of Sargsyan, the “Ruin” was reconstructed by the “Rozhdestvenka” bureau, retaining the director’s idea – “everything should be exactly the same, just not fall.”

In 2012, two years after Sargsyan’s death, the installation “David’s Cabinet” was opened in MUAR. It was designed by the Moscow bureau “Meganom”: the architects manually transferred all the objects from the former director’s office to the climate box. Sarkisian’s office was a huge collection of artifacts, relics and everyday objects placed in a typical workspace. It was called a total installation, “the unspoken center of the architectural community.” Now the office can be visited on the second floor of the “Ruins”.

“Rem Koolhaas asked to do exhibitions for him, Zaha Hadid sent him five text messages a day. And all these foreigners told each other that there are several sights in Moscow: the Kremlin, the Mausoleum, St. Basil’s Cathedral and the office of David Sargsyan, ”said the architectural critic Grigory Revzin.