Irish firm wins bid to design new Moscow super museum

Irish architectural firm Heneghan Peng Architects has won the international competition to build Moscow’s new super museum with a design that comprises a series of stacked gallery spaces. Their proposal allows visitors to the new National Centre for Contemporary Arts to go directly to one of the exhibition spaces instead of making their way up through the building.

Heneghan Peng’s portfolio includes two bridges at the centre of London’s Olympic Park, a library for the University of Greenwich, the extension and refurbishment of the National Gallery Ireland, and the development of Giant’s Causeway Visitor in Northern Ireland, which has been shortlisted for the prestigious 2013 RIBA Stirling Prize.

The firm was selected from a shortlist of three companies that included Moscow’s MEL Space and Madrid’s Nieto Sobejano Arquitectos to design a new building for the National Centre for Contemporary Arts. As well as exhibitions, the new space will host lectures, conferences, concerts and performances. The competition was launched in June 2013 and ran for six months. More than 900 submissions were received including entries from high-profile architectural bureaus such as Zaha Hadid and OMA.

The new museum is expected to become a hub for contemporary art in Moscow with a capacity for around 500,000 visitors a year. The museum will be built on an old airfield in Khodynskoye Pole in north-west Moscow along with several hotel and office complexes, a new metro station and a shopping centre.