The bilingual volume Temporary Structures in Gorky Park is a brilliantly illustrated publication tracing the history of the emergence and existence of temporary architectural constructions on the territory of Gorky Park from 1923 until today. The book will be presented by its authors and editors, architectural historians Marianna Evstratova and Sergey Koluzakov; Garage director Anton Belov; artistic director of the publication’s designer, ABCdesign Dmitry Mordvintsev; and conservation architect, expert in Russian cultural heritage Boris Pasternak.
Based on the exhibition catalogue Temporary Structures in Gorky Park: From Melnikov to Ban (2012), the idea of the album belongs to Garage director Anton Belov, who proposed the continuation of the research into Gorky Park’s temporary structures and the completion of the publication with new material, including a chapter about what has been built on its territory in the current decade. Further inspiring the release of an expanded catalogue was the 2018 acquisition by Garage of Alexei Shchusev’s collection documenting the architectural history of Gorky Park.
The new publication features a hundred previously unpublished reproductions of architectural graphics from Shchusev’s collection, as well as two new chapters: The Park in the Modernist Era and The Park in the Recent Times, 2010s.
Overall the volume contains around 300 reproductions of works by Ivan Zholtovsky, Nikolai Lanceray, Ilya Golosov, Sergei Kozhin, Fyodor Shekhtel, Konstantin Melnikov, Sergei Ridman, Alexandra Exter, Vera Mukhina, Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, Aristarkh Lentulov, and others. Its excellent print quality allows readers to appreciate the beauty of sketches, drawings, plans, cuts, and ichnographies.
