Vyksa is not just a minor city catering for the large and successful metallurgical plant owned by OMK company. Over the recent years, the city has become famous for the festival of modern urban culture, lots of graffiti, yard improvement projects, and an art residence, which has recently moved to a new building. The ponds have landscaped beaches, architects are commissioned to design bus stops and projects of renewing the city space – in a word, OMK and its “OMK Uchastie” charity foundation do a lot to create in this city something that you could describe as a “spot-on metropolitan aura”. In 2017, the city hosted an international competition for the right to decorate one of the plant’s outside walls.

Meanwhile, the project of Shukhov Park is an initiative of a quite different scale. It is situated in the city center, stretching along the dam of the Verkhnevyksynsky Pond that has a protected status as a heritage site of local importance, because it was built still in the XVIII century. The park starts from the Metallurgov Square in front of the Batashevs palace, where now the museum house of these factory owners is situated. The embankment was landscaped in 2019 in accordance with the project developed by Wowhaus; this same company developed the concept for the entire park. Soon, key engineering exhibits from the Vyksa OMK plant will be moved over here, these being the water tower and the grid shell of the sheet rolling shop, both having to do with the engineering research by engineer Vladimir Shukhov. The park will also include the building of Quantorium, an educational technology park for children, which, in addition to standard laboratories, will feature a metallurgical quantumum, engineered specifically for Vyksa. The Quantorium is being designed by Ostozhenka and Andrey Gnezdilov; and the hotel, which will stretch along the embankment – by Front Architecture. In a word, this project is a resonant one, and in many respects unique, at least due to its sheer scale, and also because of the fact that the entire park is situated about 6 or 8 meters below the water level, like fields in the Netherlands. 

As for the “Center of Industrial Progress” museum, this is the key, the most noticeable, and the fundamental part of the ambitious Vyksa project. The museum will be built on the territory of the Batashevs’ first iron foundry, which has existed here since the XVIII century (the dam was built specifically for it).

Nikita Yavein, Company:

This project is very important to me. We were able to touch something that we rarely get to work with: the very origins, the primacy of the material, and something that I would describe as the basics of our material world and life in general. This is a kind of “pre-architecture”, an architecture that comes before architecture.

The main idea is that metal has the ability to stretch, whereas most of the traditional structures as we know them – brick and stone walls, domes, vaults – are designed to utilize compression. Of course, stretching has always existed as a kind of parallel culture in tents, including architectural ones. But the metal’s ability to stretch began to be used much later, in the constructions of the XX century, including Shukhov, and especially in the works of engineers of the post-war period. In my opinion, the building of the St. Petersburg CCM stadium, which has unfortunately been torn down now, was very characteristic in this sense: its sag, a kind of “belly” hanging over the interior space, was very spectacular, and it precisely stretching-based.

In the Vyksa project of the “Center of Industrial Progress”, we return this primary function and expressiveness of metal.

In addition, we plan to use only those materials that are available locally. The plant produces, among other things, pipes and rolled steel – we take pipes of different grades and make columns of the peripters out of these materials. We take rolled steel and make “stretching” ceilings out of it. All this will be made of natural metal, which will be naturally and gradually covered with a patina, turning into a semblance of Corten steel. We consider the rusting of metal to be also a sort of installation.

Sergey Padalko, Vitruvio and Sons

Of course, this project was a very interesting one; it is my personal favorite. There are a lot of unique things in it, starting from building things below the water level: walking down the embankment at the level of the city pavement, you will be able to see the roof of the two-tiered exhibition building, that’s for sure. We were very impressed with the place, the factory, and the Shukhov structures. There was a time when we were thinking about how to work with this material, like, what can be opposed to it? And I would say that we came up with something that to some extent can be considered as “anti-Shukhov”: the roof sheets that stretch between the columns are completely different, and at the same time their functioning is interesting from an engineering point of view. We calculated that a thickness of 6 mm would be enough, but we laid 8 mm as a margin of corrosion.

And I have been observing the process of patina formation for six months in real time: it was a pity to throw away the column that was part of our installation at the ArchMoscow exhibition – I took it to my country home, and it stands there, changing from month to month. This thing is really a living being – and I think that it will be exciting to watch this effect on the scale of a whole building.