REVOLUTION OF DIGNITY MUSEUM Kyiv
STORM OF THE HILL
During the Revolution of Dignity, protesters, coming up from Maidan Square, stormed the hilI. The winning project for the „Memorial of the Heavenly Hundred Heroes“ relates to the course of events by a sequence of spaces with specific qualities in a curvilinear path along the alley. The new museum building, situated on top of the hill, symbolizes the crucial moment of the storm and transports this image into the concept of a „walkable building“. Herewith it adds sequences to the memorial path. Several ramps of different widths are organized around the building and resemble the storm of the hill in a concentrated form. At the same time, they proceed the walk up from Maidan Square onto the building. This walk leads from both sides onto a terrace, which provides a (reflective) view back to Maidan Square. Moreover, the visitor experiences a great view over the city center, to Dnjepr and the green hills in the East. The visitor is invited to continue his walk into the building and is led through the diverse exhibition spaces down, back to street level. Here they might stroll along the contemplative water basin to the Memorial garden in front of the International Center for Culture and Arts. The Memorial and Museum are correlated and offer to rethink and memorialize individual dignity in relation to society and the country as it moves into the future.
URBAN CONTEXT
The building is integrated into the typology of solitary buildings along the Alley of the Heavenly Hundred Heroes and Instytutska Street. The contours of the museum continue the lines and trajectories of the neighboring buildings, which meet at a distinctive angle in the middle of the street wall. The revolving ramps structure the building in a particular way, engaging a differentiated dialogue with the heterogenous scale of the surroundings.
FAÇADE, MATERIALS AND CONSTRUCTION
The façades are subdivided, analog to the development of the outside ramps, into a base and a pavilion- like form created by slender pillars around the circumferences. The families of the Heavenly Hundred Heroes created their own memorials with flowers and photographs in curved brick niches on top of the low wall along the alley. These „people’s“ memorials will be replaced by the memorial stela. The facade concept for the base of the museum picks up the theme of the curved niches and develops it into a structuring order, leading in succession from a narrow spacing to the rhythm of the pillars of the pavillon-like top. Due to the spacing of these niches and columns, the building appears either more open or more closed from different points of view, similar to the effect of a curtain. This impression varies according to movement along or around the building. The resulting veiling and unveiling refers metaphorically to a further level of meaning, namely to the events during the „Revolution of Dignity“. All outside surfaces of the building consist of a light colored mineral material, e.g. prefabricated concrete elements with a high quality surface of different textures. The full height windows are set back to the inside of the walls, in order to allow the rhythm of the niches to continue in front of them in the form of pillars. The glass facade of the pavillon-like top will be an all-glass construction with vertical fins. The roof structure consists of a steel girder grid supported on four concrete cores and perimeter steel columns. The perimeter columns need to resist only moderate loads from the roof structure, allowing them to have a slender steel cross-section. Skylights could be placed in the center area of the roof to bring an attractive zenith-light into the atrium. The interior materials are reduced basically to wood, glass and concrete. The walls in the exhibition areas will mainly be whitened. The base building is a monolithic reinforced concrete structure consisting of floor plates, load bearing walls and columns. The foundation is formed by a solid concrete slab, possibly reinforced by concrete piles, depending on the specific soil characteristics.
