WAI ARCHITECTURE THINK TANK’S PROPOSAL FOR NCCA COMPETITION

The New National Center for Contemporary Arts (NCCA) is the new epicentre for the creation, study, and support of contemporary art in Russia.

Enhanced by the dialectic between the city and architecture, between art and the public, between landscape and building, the new NCCA marks a paradigm shift of international museology.

By creating a building that invites and embraces the public through its open spaces the new NCCA blurs the lines between building and context, between art and life.

The NCCA is not a building in the city; it is an extension of it. The flexible autonomy of its spaces either enclosed or outdoors, makes it the first archetype of Museum as City.

Instead of emulating the boundary that usually separates museums from their context, the new NCCA building is an Open Museum. The arrangement of the volumes on the ground level allows the public to freely circulate through its open spaces creating a new urban museum experience.

The new NCCA is not a building within a park; the park and the building are inseparable. Linked by way of a harmonious symbiosis, a series of paths direct the public between metro station, park and building in an effortless journey that offers glimpses of outdoor sculptures in an environment for the contemplation of art.

The new NCCA brings art to the public. The building creates a promenade in which people interact with exhibition pieces featured in the public space and on the multiple terraces of the building.

The layout of the NCCA consists of a ground level that contains public programs, creative residences, office space, conference halls and the collection repository, and three volumes of varying heights that intersect at different points creating a maze of flexible exhibition space.

Location: Moscow, Russia 
Architect: WAI Architecture Think Tank 
Project Team: Cruz Garcia, Nathalie Frankowski, Edgar Garcia, Zhang Yanping, Yu Yihua, Anna Popova, Ilyas Sadybekov 
Structure: +G (Felix Cruz Marcos, Laura Gil Santana) 
Technology and Sustainability:  Alejandra Garcia Hooghuis 
Museology Consultant:  Evgenia Novgorodova 
Area: 45,000 m2 
Year: 2013 
Client: National Centerfor Contemporary Arts (NCCA)