where:	Russia, Moscow
function:	Culture / Museum
studio:	NRDN
architect:	Aleksey Kurkov, Dmitriy Selivokhin

When we first came to the Darwin Museum, we realized that it was too much on the lively side. If the main building of the 1980’s was built expressly as a museum, then the tower attached to it in the 1990’s was intended for storage and administration, but as a result, something happens on each of its seven floors, and you can only enter the building through the basement. The museum has a complex structure, two cloakrooms and two ticket offices – we had to bring everything to a common denominator.

The main exposition occupies three floors and seven halls, each of which tells its own story – the origin of life, microevolution, and macroevolution. To identify these spaces, illustrator Rodion Kitaev came up with compositions made in different techniques – from stylization for children's drawings to the cut out technique and woodcuts.

We made the navigation modules pretty austere because there are many bright exhibits in the museum as it is. The floor plans resemble an explosion diagram and clearly show how the halls are connected. We marked different buildings with color: orange was used for the main building, and blue was used for the annex. Where it is necessary to emphasize something, we allowed ourselves large bright objects, otherwise we kept it simple.

where:	Russia, St. Petersburg
function:	Culture / Museum
studio:	NRDN
architect:	Aleksey Kurkov

The Yusupov Palace first set us the task of a new zoning of the basements, where the infrastructure is concentrated – a buffet, toilets, a shop, and only after that did we do the navigation throughout the museum, as well as in the garden.

Due to the fact that we couldn’t alter the historical plan of the basement floor, we came up with new designations of the premises, and new directions for movement. For the intuitive navigation in space, we proposed to accentuate two corridors – one, with the vaults, was to be cleared from stucco, and the other, with the windows, was to be painted yellow, with plaques about the history of the palace hanging on the walls. Not everything was implemented, but we did succeed in one main thing – moving the cloakroom and the cash desk, organizing a roundabout, adding an entrance from the Decembrists Street, and separate the streams of groups and individual visitors.

For the floors with historical interiors, we chose a more reserved solution: golden pedestals and a “palace” style of the pictographs. Each hall is unique, and the navigation modules also turned out to be unique. In the garden, the navigation is minimally sufficient because the park is essentially a heritage site, and it does not have that many objects to point to.

where:	Russia, Moscow
function:	Landscape / Park
studio:	NRDN
architect:	Aleksey Kurkov

In Gorky Park, they commissioned us with navigation for a children’s playground. We proceeded from the concept by the AFA architects that kids are explorers – you don’t have to tell them what is waiting for them around the corner. This is why we focused on two elements – the map that allows you to cover everything at once, and on the rules of conduct that were developed in cooperation with psychologists.

To broadcast the rules, we came up with comics with characters who “live” in concrete houses – navigation modules with six working sides. Each house has its own size and design: the kids have lower houses, the older ones have higher ones. In total, there were eight houses and two cards.

A plaque that tells you what you can and cannot do is some kind of inevitable thing for such places, and often it looks pretty invasive. But here, however, the way I see it, the little houses did fit in just fine.

where:	Russia, Moscow
function:	Landscape / Park
studio:	NRDN
architect:	Aleksey Kurkov, Anton Ladygin

This manor park is an architectural ensemble, and we wanted to make navigation as non-invasive as possible, at the same time highlighting historical objects. We came up with two formats of navigational modules: for the existing and the lost historical objects we used frames, the kind you use for pictures, and for the infrastructure projects we used steles made from wood and metal.

Frames made of larch with matte “canvases” do not obscure the views, but at the same time they are packed with information – maps, diagrams, texts and visual reconstructions. They tell stories that maximize the experience of staying in the park – about the main manor house, which has not been preserved, about the oak grove, which is more than a hundred years old, about the dachas of the beginning of the XX century and the landing of the airship described in “War and Peace”. And, finally, the transparent overlay gives the effect of augmented reality.

All the information is duplicated in Braille, there are relief maps the size of two human palms – it seems to us that the visually impaired can get the whole image of the place at once, after which it will be easier for them to navigate.