Boris Bernaskoni

A first for Russia, the Yeltsin Center is a presidential centre on the model of US presidential libraries. It is a social, cultural and educational institution built in the city of Yekaterinburg, birthplace of President Boris Yeltsin. The centre houses a museum (2016's European Museum of the Year), art gallery, educational centre, documentary film centre, bookshop, café and other public facilities. Due to lack of vacant sites, Bernaskoni redesigned an existing business centre, to which he added a new form. This was achieved mainly through a curtain wall, covering half the premises in a sheet of steel, perforated with a series of openings displaying rotational symmetry. The resultant Center is a modest and neutral structure that nevertheless has a visual identity and silhouette distinct from any other building in Yekaterinburg, which the architect has characterized as its “urban supergraphics”.  

Matrex was built at the Skolkovo Innovation Center in 2015 near the Skoltech Complex. This project provides a basis for the development of informational and energy efficient technologies, with a special emphasis on transparency of space and work. The mixed-use building combines Class A and startup offices, apartments, the transforming hall, the spiral museum (exhibit spiral), the restaurant. The truncated pyramid contains an internal space in the form of a giant Matryoshka, or Russian nestling doll.

Hypercube is the first building at the Skolkovo Innovation Center. The decision to erect the Hypercube building was made by Russian president Dmitry Medvedev in 2010. The building is a platform for communication, combining the roles of a public space and generator for new start-up enterprises, and part of a university campus. The building has its own energy and water supplyautonomous systems. Hypercube was built in accordance with the green standard "Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design" (LEED v3).

In 2001 he led a "sense analyses" seminar for students of the Moscow Academy of Architecture. Since 2003 he has been a lecturer at the Moscow Academy of Architecture's Urban Planning department. In 2004 he has led a project seminar in New York for students of the Moscow Academy of Architecture invited by the Harvard Design School.

Bernaskoni graduated in Architecture from the Moscow Academy of Architecture, having studied in the department of "Housing and Social Design Construction" under the supervision of Professors Belov, Khazanov and Pakhomov. In 2000 Boris completed a 2-years long course of Marketing at the Plekhanov Russian Academy of Economics. He then joined a postgraduate course in "Composition in Architecture" at the Moscow Academy of Architecture in 2000-2003.

Bernaskoni set up his practice as soon as he graduated in 2000. He founded an interdisciplinary bureau that works at the intersection of architecture, communication and industrial design. The bureau specializes in the design and realization of various architectural objects: urban projects, office and residential buildings, exhibitions and museums, country houses and industrial objects. The bureau's portfolio includes many significant projects: Matrex, the main public building at the Skolkovo Center; Hypercube, also at Skolkovo; masterplans for Preobrazhensky in Yaroslavl Oblast and the Red October chocolate factory complex in Moscow; New Holland Summer in Saint Petersburg; the country houses Volgadacha and Mirror Mongayt; competitive projects for the Russia Pavilion in Shanghai, PERMMUSEUMXXI, the Tetris residential building, reconstruction of the Central House of Artists (CHA) in Moscow; the exhibitions OLEGKULIK and Kandinsky Prize; identity and the interior of the Government of Russia Press Center and the BBDO Moscow office space; and industrial design of the national class sailing boat EM-KA.

The book includes exhibits, exhibition spaces and museums designed by Bernaskoni bureau in 2000-2008. The projects are arranged in the following order: from exhibition pieces to a building, thereby demonstrating the idea of a gradual transformation of museum space from an introverted object (Message to Kazimir) into a spatial environment (PERMMUSEUMXXI). The book covers 12 projects, each of which reflects a different treatment of the idea of museum space.

Boris Bernaskoni (born 26 February 1977, Moscow) is a Russian architect, engineer, publisher, the recipient of various architectural awards and a participant in various architectural exhibitions. He is the founder of the BERNASKONI bureau . Boris Bernaskoni is a founding member of the Urban Council Board at the Skolkovo Innovation Center in Moscow. Boris Bernaskoni first achieved international recognition in 2008 when he won an international competition for the Perm Museum of Modern Art that was juried by Peter Zumthor and had participants like Coop Himmelbau, Zaha Hadid and Asymptote. His Matrex project received high acclaim at the 15th Venice Biennale of Architecture in 2016. In 2019 Bernaskoni participated in several events at the Davos World Economic Forum, talking on transformable architecture in the cities of the future and urban digitalization.