Il restauro dell’ala Ruina del Museo di Architettura A. V. Schusev a Mosca

The Ruina wing (in Russian, ruin) of the Museum of Architecture Aleksey Viktorovich Schusev of Moscow was originally the coach house of the estate built in 1787 for the chamberlain Aleksandr Talyzin, starting from a project attributed to the architect Matvey Kazakov. In 1805 the whole estate was sold to a merchant named Ustinov and underwent some structural changes. With new Empire-style façades, it became one of the cultural salons of the city, frequented by the Vyazemskie brothers, Aleksandr Pushkin and Denis Davydov. In 1845 the management of the building was handed on to the Ministry of Finance and two floors were added to the former coach house. After the October Revolution, the complex was acquired by the Central Committee of the CPSU (1920), then moved to the Gosplan (Agency for Economic Planning of the USSR) and then to the Ministry of Justice, to be finally used as a collective accommodation for popular housing in 1930. Immediately after World War Two, part of the main building was intended for the Museum of Architecture, requiring a restoration made difficult by the fact that the lodgers continued to live inside it. The last tenant left the building only in 1961. After a fire in the 1990s, the building ended up in a state of decay which is at the origin of the name Ruina with which it is known today. However, David Sarkisyan, the charming director of the Museum from 2000 to 2009, began to display the Ruina to his guests as a work of art, an attraction. Despite all the problems and the state of degradation, he was able to grasp the specificity of the building and proceeded with the restoration without waiting for funding: he installed temporary protections on the window spaces, had the roof repaired (it was partially destroyed by the fire), laid some planks on the ground and began to set up exhibitions in this wing too.