By the turn of 2025-2026, Sergey Tchoban had completed two major museum projects almost simultaneously – an achievement of significance for any architectural practice. It is therefore no surprise that, when asked by the curators of the Masters exhibition at ARCH Moscow to select the works that mattered most to him, he chose these two museums. We have already covered the ZILART project in Moscow.

Now we turn to the Perm Art Gallery, which Sergey Tchoban describes as one of the most important works of his career in Russia.



Its story is long and requires a brief introduction. In 1932, the museum moved into the building of the former Transfiguration Cathedral, where it assembled an extraordinary collection. Over time, however, the museum outgrew the cathedral, and after 1989 it became increasingly clear that the building would eventually have to be returned to the Russian Orthodox Church. The first architectural competition for a new gallery building was held in 1993 and was won by architect Viktor Shchipalkin. The most widely publicized competition followed in 2007-2008, organized by the Center for Contemporary Architecture. It resulted in two winning proposals, with Peter Zumthor serving as chair of the jury. In 2011, after religious services resumed in the cathedral, Zumthor was commissioned to develop an entirely new museum project. The proposal was ultimately declined by the regional governor because of its projected cost and concerns over the geotechnical conditions. Throughout these years, the proposed location for the museum kept changing. In 2014, the city established a commission that evaluated no fewer than 25 (!) potential sites for the new gallery. At the same time, the British exhibition design firm Casson Mann was invited to develop a conceptual exhibition strategy. Their preliminary study demonstrated that the museum could be accommodated within the former Perm Military Institute of Rocket Forces (decommissioned in 2003).

A new chapter began in 2018, when Perm embraced the idea of redeveloping the Pervogorod (“First Settlement”) site, while Sergey Tchoban presented a master plan for a cultural cluster to occupy the area, bringing together the Opera and Ballet Theater, the PERMM Museum of Contemporary Art, the Regional Museum, and the new Perm Art Gallery. The gallery’s location – entirely different from all previously proposed sites, where the First Settlement had only occasionally been mentioned – was established as part of Tchoban’s master plan. In the end, the gallery became the only project within Perm’s new cultural cluster to be designed and ultimately built by Sergey Tchoban and his firm, SPEECH.



The road to this point was long, yet the completed museum represents an entirely new – and, fortunately, successful – iteration. In many ways, it stands apart from the earlier competitions and decades of debate that preceded it.

Still, the 2007-2008 CSA competition remains an important point of reference. It reflected the search for architectural “starchitects” and the hope that a landmark building might deliver a local version of the “Bilbao effect”.

Tellingly, Sergey Tchoban now positions his own design in deliberate contrast to the very notion of an iconic building.

Sergei Tchoban, SPEECH, Tchoban Voss Architekten, Chart Studio

I have taken part in competitions for “wow” museum projects, and quite often they lead nowhere – that is, they do not result in actual construction. I believe there is an objective reason behind this: museum projects are highly dependent on the narrative and logic of the exhibition itself. Iconic projects, designed around a bold and spectacular architectural statement, rarely take this essential factor into account.

Therefore, when working on the Perm Art Gallery project, I discarded all the “wow architecture” approaches that had initially come to mind. I realized that a monumental scale and a single, unified gesture would contradict the idea of “growing” the building through modular elements – a kind of spatial collage. Preserving this idea was very important to me. This is not about pursuing some kind of radical novelty – today, if innovation is possible at all, it lies in the details. What matters much more is appropriateness. And in this case, I am convinced that the approach we chose is appropriate both from a local perspective and on a broader urban scale, including in relation to the future development of the cultural cluster.