OMA/AMO project

In the last three years, AMO/OMA has collaborated with the Hermitage Museum on an essential issue: how to modernize the Hermitage Museum while accepting one of Russia’s great legacies on its own terms.

This investigation could lead to a new definition of modernity. The underlying theory of the Hermitage project is based on the observation that the Hermitage was not built as a museum initially. This historical condition has produced a charged misfit between its original intentions and its adapted uses.

Construction of the Hermitage complex began in 1764. The Hermitage has undergone three forms of political regime: first the Tsar, then communism and now the market economy, each representing different forms of neglect.

Ironically, it is precisely the successive forms of neglect that have helped to generate the Hermitage’s unique condition, staging a confrontation with art more direct and more authentic than in many of the savvier museums.

The experience of seeing Kasimir Malevich’s Black Square hanging among slightly absurd curtains in a highly decorated room under fluorescent lights could be considered emblematic of a new relationship between modernity and the past, one of the most valuable and important statements of the 20th-Century.

OMA/AMO has been asked to reconceive the nature of the Hermitage, a vast complex consisting of three buildings along the river and a new building that will be added to it: the General Staff Building.

The Hermitage currently has 1200 rooms, with the expansion of the GSB 800 new rooms will be added. We began by identifying the diverse status and nature of the rooms and walls in the existing buildings. 70% of the GSB is dominated with rooms with decoration not to be maintained.
Palace and museum rooms with historical decoration fully preserved rooms with historical decoration to be restored rooms with historical decoration not to be maintained HERMITAGE + GSB.

We are also dealing with the issue of how to divide three and a half million artefacts of the Hermitage across the 2000 rooms. Our deliberate strategy is to avoid a typical architecture of preservation, which would in fact be a radical transformation of the existing situation.

We abstained from the often-used idea of establishing new connections by covering courtyards as a device of modernization.

An emblematic example of this strategy is the Great Court of the British Museum, a preservation project with an architecture anxious not to compete with the existing structure, creating a filigree roof that casts horrible triangular shadows. The separation between preservation and modern architecture and the inability to rethink the past resulted in this sullen missstep. This is only one example of a continuously expanding universe of ‘respectfully’ treated historical buildings.

We are trying to avoid the rupture between the past and the present, primarily by maintaining ruined sections of the building.

By putting some of the most valuable works in some of the most distressed areas, we are creating new conditions. The Hermitage can reinvent modernity, not in terms of a style, but in terms of finding an intelligent way of using existing spaces.

Instead of considering the services in an old-fashioned way by laboriously guiding air and other things, we can use new technology to simply create a different regime.

We are questioning the necessity of adding more building to the building. We could carefully study the possibility of carving in the existing building to reveal new spatial potentials for displaying art in the General Staff Building.

We are currently involved in creating a sort of resource manual for intervening in the General Staff Building.

A set of simple ideas could trigger new and more efficient ways of experiencing art in the Hermitage as a whole.
 

The Hermitage. The New Great Enfilade

Russian version

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