Culture++

In his book Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City, William Mitchell describes the humans of the digital age as a biotechnological phenomenon: thanks to the internet and gadgets, their capabilities are not limited to what the body can access. 

People have become more mobile and have gained more free time. But there is a negative side to this—holding attention and engaging people in new activities has become more difficult. Reflecting on this phenomenon, we have formulated the Culture++ principle, which describes a new approach to designing public spaces: they consist of a functional magnet—theatrical in the case of a theatre, or educational for an educational establishment—and a territory for co-creation and communication.

Our credo is to design events, not walls. We try to imagine a person living in the resulting space: what they do there, what interests them, whom they encounter and how they interact. We strive to emphasise the intensity of experiencing a place and to foster a sense of belonging.

The Culture++ principle took shape early on, starting from our very first projects—the Praktika Theatre and the Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design.

The Praktika Theatre is located in the basement of a residential building in the lanes around Patriarch’s Ponds in Moscow. We extended the theatre into the courtyard, expanding its range of influence. An open foyer in the courtyard serves theatre-goers and passers-by alike.

At the Strelka Institute, the classes evolved into a public space with an amphitheatre for lectures and events, a bar, and an art studio, all joining to become the Strelka Institute complex, where people of different walks of life, from students to millionaires, came to mingle. It was Moscow’s very first hybrid space of such kind, and at the time of the opening nobody quite knew what to make of it. In the end, Strelka turned out to be the quintessential example of porosity in urban planning, which is the underlying principle of most of our projects.

The new building of the Galiasgar Kamal Tatarian State Academic Theatre in Kazan, which we created together with the Japanese practice Kengo Kuma & Associates, is not a temple of art in the conventional, elitist sense. The theatre is not only open for performances: it is a fully-fledged public space, a nexus of urban life, where there is something for everyone at any time.

At the Stanislavsky Electrotheatre, the black box stage allows for endless variations in auditorium configuration and seating arrangements. The entire building is transformable: experimental productions, fashion shows, and photography exhibitions take place on the grand staircase, backstage, in the foyer, and in the courtyard.

Traditional museums display only a small fraction of what they hold—up to 90% of their treasures are accessible only to staff. When designing museums, we recommend opening up part of the collections. Wowhaus combined the principle of openness with that of porosity in the Moscow Polytechnic Museum reconstruction project, carried out jointly with the Japanese practice junya.ishigami + associates. We believe this approach can bring more people to cultural institutions.

The boundaries between disciplines and leisure options, between street and building are gradually blurring. High culture, created by professionals, coexists with the profane, and they often share the same audience. A modern cultural institution is not just a place for exhibiting art, but a space for people to interact with art and with each other.