Strelka Institute, Moscow. Up, up and away?

The present site of the Strelka Institute for Media Architecture and Design in Moscow is a disused chocolate factory called Red October on the island of Bolotny. This will soon be the focal point of an urban development project and the school needs to pull up its roots and move away.



Strelka is a truly forward-thinking architecture school, established in 2009 with an educational programme developed by Rem Koolhaas and his firm, OMA. It is this institute’s work that has put ideas like “public space” and “suburbs” on the map of Moscow’s urban planning agenda.



Now it’s the school’s turn to show how it can react to a huge challenge: relocation.





What better approach than handing over this can of worms to the students themselves? Nine teams took one month to work on their ideas for the future of Strelka. The winning team – Squadra Komanda (IT-NL-UA-US) – was announced in February and it gave a symbolic name to its proposal: “Strelka Unsettled”.



Their project really fits into the groove of the Russian capital and its architecture, highlighting two key challenges that Strelka needs to address: the Soviet urban landscape, most of which consists of buildings constructed after World War II and before the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the outdated cultural institutions that are long due for a complete overhaul.





The new site identified in “Strelka Unsettled” is the All Russian State Library for Foreign Literature (ВГБИЛ), on the banks of the river Yauza (thereby continuing with the river theme), situated 2 km east of the Red Square. The proposal involves revamping the monumental building that dates back to the '60s, doubling the size of the school and offering lots of new features and facilities to share with the local community, including a kindergarten, hotel, library, coffee shop and auditorium. This makes the project a kind of “new urban prototype” for Russia, as well as an actual manifesto for Strelka, whose goal is to change the country’s urban landscape.



And once it has achieved its goal, why not move up, up and away again, in search of other venues to redevelop and revive? It could even become a new way of educating…a virtuous circle!

Strelka Unsettled
Project by Squadra Komanda
Moscow, 2014
Images courtesy of Squadra Komanda: Roel van Herpt, strategist (Amsterdam, NL), Daniele Belleri, journalist (Milan, IT), Olena Grankina, architect (Kiev, UA), Giulio Margheri, architect (Florence, IT), Nicolas Moore, architect (Providence, US)