UrGAHU Museum of Architecture and Design

About museum

The opening of the Museum on issues of the history and prospects for the development of Ural architecture took place on March 29, 1975. The museum was housed in three monuments of 19th-century industrial architecture. In the late 1970s an exhibition of large-scale equipment from Ural factories was deployed in the museum courtyard. In 1985 the museum was renamed the Museum of the History of Architecture and Industrial Technology of the Urals. In 2008 a reconstruction project was developed envisaging the unification of all buildings into a single multifunctional complex, where alongside the museum the Ural Center for Design Development was located. Promoting the Ural school of design became one of the museum's priorities, and in 2012 it was renamed the UrGAHU Museum of Architecture and Design. After reconstruction the complex is a unique structure where cutting-edge design is combined with the original historic buildings. In the storage building there are exhibitions devoted to the history of mining-and-plant machinery, the Ural school of design and artistic culture. In the premises of the lumber-drying shop is the exhibition "Architecture of the Stone Belt": models, drawings and photographs of monuments of Ural architecture. Seven sections tell of the main stages of architectural development and introduce historical styles: from folk wooden architecture and Baroque to avant-garde and contemporary architecture. The museum's collection comprises more than 48,000 storage units. The Art Library is open-access and houses the latest domestic and foreign publications on architecture and design. The monument to Peter I was moved from the inner, now covered courtyard to a new location — together with the large-scale equipment it was installed in the Historical Square, where along the façades of the renovated complex a miniature industrial landscape park was created. The museum's mission is to acquaint visitors with the history of regional architecture and the Ural school of design and to showcase the full diversity of the Urals' artistic culture.