`2013 UK Award Part 2`
Kizhi Island

Ben Hayes’s project proposes a museum landscape that will facilitate the restoration and reassembly of over two hundred wooden Orthodox churches on Kizhi Island in Northern Russia. He explains, “these fragile, desecrated structures have a spiritual presence that commands respect, however, in the next ten to fifteen years these wooden monuments will almost totally disappear.” This proposal explores in-depth the changing relationship between the Russian landscape and national identity, tracing back the influence of Romanticism at the start of the nineteenth century.

Ben Hayes
University College London Bartlett School of Architecture

View Project Boards

JuryKent Jackson Dimitri Jajich Niall McLaughlin John-Paul Nunes Fred Pilbrow

This proposal is for a museum landscape that will facilitate the restoration and reassembly of 250 wooden Orthodox churches onto Kizhi Island in Northern Russia.

These fragile, desecrated structures have a spiritual presence that command respect, however, in the next ten to fifteen years these wooden monuments will almost totally disappear. The churches were once central to their communities, just as the Orthodox faith was central to the people. They speak of the inner lives of the people in this place. This lyrical proposal explores in-depth the changing relationship between the Russian landscape and national identity, tracing back the influence of Romanticism at the start of the nineteenth century and looking at the wide scale impact of Soviet collectivization and deruralisation.

The death of the Russian village. © Ben Hayes.

The demise of villages has been taking place throughout the whole vastness of the former Soviet Union for decades. However, recently the situation has escalated further. If Russia’s cultural institutions do not respond to this, a large period of Russian cultural heritage will disappear. © Ben Hayes.

This project challenges the program of the existing museum on Kizhi Island and considers a more ambitious architectural intervention, radically expanding it to include all 250 wooden churches. I propose a new restoration facility and museum to facilitate the dismantling of the church monuments from their original location, their transportation to Kizhi via shipping, their restoration, and open-air curation across the whole island. The facility will contain temporary and permanent structures for research, storage, preservation, and exhibition of each church that has been relocated. The project addresses two problems: it protects and restores this fragile heritage that today is on the verge of total extinction, and it dramatically redesigns the visitor experience on the island.

The intervention adopts an approach to the island’s landscape: the whole island is treated as a repository of protected buildings that is constantly transforming, thus challenging existing notions of preservation and heritage. The new formation of this landscape will be the impetus for the comprehensive study of the buildings and amassing data connected to them. The project is an earnest call for the protection and celebration of this most fragile part of the cultural heritage of Russia.

A sectional overlay of a set of proposed churches to be relocated onto Kizhi Island. The Study is used as a form finder and design tool to determine the shape of the structure of building that will enclose a set of church types while they are restored. © Ben Hayes.

A new restoration facility and museum is proposed to facilitate the dismantling of each monument, its transportation to Kizhi Island, and its restoration. Five restoration hangars are designed to specifically accommodate a set of selected churches based on their typological classification. The artifacts are then restored in bays between workshops. The sliding roof structures lift the artifacts into and across the bay during the process. © Ben Hayes.

The sliding doors are specifically designed to accommodate a set of church types. The internal structure is a habitable gantry system for the carpenters to restore and reconstruct the artifacts as well as a space for visitors to access and observe the artifact from above. © Ben Hayes.

Restoration sequence. © Ben Hayes.

Artifact storage and island maintenance. © Ben Hayes.

Servicing the landscape. © Ben Hayes.

In this proposal the island is drawn one hundred years from now, to establish a set of rules and an informed strategy of curation. © Ben Hayes.

Areas of the island become urbanized as more and more wooden heritage is brought on to the island. The island is initially planned out to accommodate over 250 wooden churches and space for further building typologies to be brought to the landscape. © Ben Hayes.

This design proposal for Kizhi Island developed out of the practice of making large-scale drawings, models, and environments. A range of scales and media have been used to test and explore ideas on the subject of material culture and the treatment of architectural heritage in the future. © Ben Hayes.

Ben Hayes
University College London
Bartlett School of Architecture

Ben Hayes

has previously worked at Matthew Springett Associates, Foster + Partners, and has lived and worked in both London and Beijing. Hayes joined Niall McLaughlin Architects in 2013, where he is presently employed. In continuing his interest and research in Russian heritage, Hayes used his research fellowship for further travel to Russia to continue to work on the Russian Ark Project and collaborate with the charity, Wooden Architecture at Risk (WAaR).

2013 UK Award Part 2 Kizhi Island

`2013 UK Award Part 2`
Kizhi Island