The exhibition “The Polytechnic Museum: Bringing the Future Closer” opened at the Museum of Moscow

The exhibition “The Polytechnic Museum: Bringing the Future Closer” has opened at the Museum of Moscow. In fact, it is not about the future, but about the glorious past. The main scientific and technical museum of the country has passed 150 years. In 2013, the Polytechnic closed for reconstruction – and became another museum long-term construction site. The exhibition (planned to be shown in other cities) brought together a wide variety of items from his huge collection – from the first light bulbs and a gramophone to models of a nuclear reactor and a Soviet lunar station – in order to stir up interest in the opening of the Polytechnic, scheduled for 2024. Tells Igor Grebelnikov.

In the impossibly long time ago of 2011, the Japanese architect Junya Ishigami won an international competition for the reconstruction project of the Polytechnic Museum. For the bulky eclectic building of the Polytechnic Museum, the Japanese came up with an elegant solution – to connect it with the city through a park, which will be laid out in a recess around the building so that the ground floor will become elevated, with two courtyards and through passages in all directions. At the current exhibition at the Museum of Moscow, in the last room on a blurry video you can see renderings of the Ishigami project, and even in this quality it is a fascinating sight. Due to the numerous through passages, whitewashed facades and interior spaces, the colossus of the Polytechnic Museum seems almost weightless.

Alas, in this form, the Japanese project turned out to be unrealizable in our realities in relation to a government facility, and now in the contractor’s presentations they write that it is “based on the architectural concept” of Ishigami. However, judging by how the building appeared in the fall of 2019, when the scaffolding was removed from it, only the most general features remained from the original project. Now, due to the brickwork of the ground floor, the ivory-colored building gives the impression that it has been excavated, but the pit around it has already been improved. So far, everything looks quite ordinary even by the standards of modern Moscow urban planning, however, work continues in full swing.

Meanwhile, the huge collection of the Polytechnic Museum itself has been housed in an open storage facility in Technopolis Moscow since 2014, where it can only be viewed as part of a guided tour. And the Museum of Moscow now shows a digest of the history of the Polytechnic – its collections, buildings, events that took place there – illustrated with the most valuable exhibits.

This story is informative and in some ways even instructive. It dates back to the era of the industrial revolution, which in Russia occurred late, but after the defeat in the Crimean War it proceeded at an accelerated pace. Following the model of the World Exhibition in Paris in 1867, it was decided to organize a similar large-scale exhibition in Moscow. The initiative to hold the Polytechnic Exhibition in 1872 came from scientists from the Imperial Society of Lovers of Natural History, Anthropology and Ethnography; they enlisted the support of the Moscow authorities and major industrialists, and since its holding was timed to coincide with the 200th anniversary of Peter the Great, the highest patronage was received. The exhibits were to become the basis of the collection of the future Polytechnic Museum. This was a far-sighted and correct calculation (there were also enough exhibits to found the collection of the Historical Museum, which will open a little later), as well as the fact that in the future the museum was built exclusively with the money of large industrialists and private donors (in return they received retail space on the ground floor of the building ).

The exhibition of 1872 was held on an unprecedented scale – cars, locomotives, instruments, agricultural and industrial products, models and drawings explaining various technical innovations, weapons, military relics, expositions of Turkestan and the Caucasus. For the opening ceremony, Tchaikovsky wrote a cantata “In memory of the 200th anniversary of the birth of Peter the Great.” Later, the composer’s signature sheet music was lost, but the score was recreated based on the orchestral and choral parts: for the current exhibition it was re-performed and recorded – it can be heard in the exhibition.

Apparently, given that the exhibition at the Museum of Moscow is conceived as a traveling one, the exhibits were placed in an emphatically camp manner – inside or next to the wooden containers in which they are usually stored and transported, here they also serve as partitions between sections. The exhibits surround the viewer quite tightly, and you can also pull out storage drawers and see what’s in them, turn on various devices and interactive panels, and practice playing the theremin. There is a bookcase here, reminiscent of the famous library of the Polytechnic Museum with lifetime editions of Erasmus of Rotterdam, Isaac Newton, and “Arithmetic” by Leonty Magnitsky, from which Lomonosov studied mathematics. You can look into the only surviving example in the world of an aplanatic mirror – a giant lens, when passing through which a ray of sunlight can melt metal. For car lovers, the first electric passenger car, Columbia, turns out to have been assembled in England back in 1901.

The numbers, of which there are many in the exhibition, can also be amazing in themselves. Thus, in 1962, the Polytechnic Museum was visited by 1,784,191 people (this is much more than today in total for all branches of the Museum of Moscow) – however, such a turnout remains a mystery for the museum workers themselves. One can, of course, assume that Yuri Gagarin’s flight also turned out to be a promotional event for the museum (the exhibition has an excellent selection of space-themed exhibits). But in the Thaw years, the “physicists” among the Polytechnic audience were definitely complemented by the “lyricists.” A fragment of Khutsiev’s film “Ilyich’s Outpost” with performances by Voznesensky, Akhmadulina, Yevtushenko and others in the museum’s crowded Great Auditorium makes a strong impression – even our most successful museums can only dream of this kind of sold-out crowd today.