Museum of the History of Architecture and Industrial Technology of the Urals

The Museum of the History of Architecture and Industrial Technology of the Urals is an open-air museum set in historic factory buildings in central Yekaterinburg, at 4A Gorkogo Street, in the Historical Square by the Plotinka dam. It belongs to the Ural State University of Architecture and Art (formerly an academy) and today goes by the name Museum of Architecture and Design.

History

The museum opened in 1975 as a department of the Sverdlovsk Architectural Institute. It was given five monuments of industrial architecture from the second half of the 19th century, left over from the Yekaterinburg Mechanical Factory: a timber-drying shop, a drafting office, several storehouses and the walls of the turning shop. These buildings are now protected as monuments of federal significance, and they are as much a part of the exhibition as the collection inside.

The museum later took the name Museum of the History of Architecture and Industrial Technology of the Urals, which is still how most people look for it. As the institute became an academy and then a university, the museum changed its role: it remained a teaching and research base for architecture and design students and also became a venue for exhibitions on contemporary architecture and design. In the 2010s it was renamed the Museum of Architecture and Design. In 1992 a bust of Peter the Great, founder of the Urals mining and metallurgical industry, was put up in the museum's courtyard.

What to see

The permanent exhibition has three sections: "The Stone Belt", "History of Old Ural Technology" and "History of the Development and Planning of Yekaterinburg". Together they show how the Ural ironworks shaped the region and how a factory settlement by a dam grew into a large city. The former storehouses hold displays on the history of mining and metallurgical machinery and industrial design.

The most striking part is the industrial landscape park in the Historical Square, where large machines and mechanisms from Ural factories stand in the open air, the kind of exhibits that would never fit in an ordinary hall.

The collection holds more than 48,000 items. There is also an archive and a library on the history of architectural education in the Urals, a photo library of architectural sites and rare documents.

Getting there

The museum is in the very centre of the city, between the Plotinka and Gorkogo Street. The nearest metro station is Ploshchad 1905 Goda, a few minutes' walk through the Historical Square, and many city buses stop nearby. A visit fits easily into a walk along the Plotinka and the Iset embankment.