Server Room

The MUAR $\times$ TSEK Lab gave twenty-one participants access to the museum’s digital catalog and asked each to select a document or object and create a piece of work in dialogue with it. I chose an archival letter from the Deputy Director of the Museum of Russian Architecture, A. Batanov, to the head of Housing and Utilities Office No. 11, requesting the removal of boilers from the former boiler room in the basement of the Apothecary’s Order. This is a testament to how architecture is constantly being rewritten from within, adapting to the needs of its time.

Today, when museum conservators carefully preserve even empty card catalog drawers as part of history, it is difficult to imagine the deconstruction of historical elements. But what if the meter-thick walls of the Aptekarsky Prikaz are merely a shell? What if behind the 17th-century brickwork there exists a different reality—endless server rooms filled with terabytes of digitized memory?

Tearing through the fabric that mimics brickwork, a view opens onto a server room—a space that could exist within the massive walls and columns. The installation invites visitors to glimpse the museum’s future, where historical architecture becomes just an outer casing for new forms of memory storage.

Exhibition «No Time, ” the first exhibition of the MUAR × CEX Laboratory, Apothecary Order, Shchusev Museum of Architecture, Moscow, July 22 — October 5, 2025
Laboratory Curators: Natalya Mastalerg (NOWADAYS Bureau), Yulia Staborovskaya-Ardabievskaya (Saga), Lola Khrunova, and Varvara Aleshin (Shchusev Museum of Architecture)