NB! · Architecture · Moscow · Observations

I continue to keep watch over my favourite building site in Moscow, the pedestrian bridge on Bolotnaya Embankment

I continue to keep watch over my favourite building site in Moscow, the pedestrian bridge on Bolotnaya Embankment. The bridge is taking on convincing outlines, and soon we shall be testing the new promenade route

Architecture · Moscow · Museums · Observations

The Pushkin Museum's 2026 logo and a call to return to the previous one

I thought the Pushkin Museum's previous logo was a failure, but now they have replaced it with something even more abstract: just four columns, although the portico of the main building rests on six. And yet they could simply have admitted the mistake of 2024 and gone back

A yellow building with white façade details and an inner courtyard with benches and flower beds under a clear sky.

Moscow · Museums · Observations · Heritage

Ground collapses in the inner courtyard of the Scriabin Museum, and access is restricted

Ground collapse in the courtyard of the Scriabin Museum. I hope it can all be put right without any serious consequences

Architecture · Art · Moscow · Observations · Heritage

A couple of days ago I posted a reel about the sad, dilapidated state of the wonderful openwork cast-iron Demidov fence in front of the Pedagogical Library in Bolshoy Tolmachyovsky Lane, and literally today word came that restoration work has begun there…

A couple of days ago I posted a reel about the sad, dilapidated state of the wonderful openwork cast-iron Demidov fence in front of the Pedagogical Library in Bolshoy Tolmachyovsky Lane, and literally today word came that restoration work has begun on the spot. I do not yet know

NB! · Architecture · Moscow · Observations

I enjoy watching the construction of the pedestrian bridge along Bolotnaya Embankment

I enjoy watching the construction of the pedestrian bridge along Bolotnaya Embankment. It will probably be open in time for City Day

Art · Moscow · Museums · Observations

Man with a Log

Portrait of a Senior Inspector. Art group "Rossiya". I very much liked this painting at the new exhibition in the Voznesensky Centre. The wall label states that the portrait on display belongs to a cycle of three images of senior inspectors of the group "Inspection Medical Hermeneutics&

NB! · Moscow · Observations · Society · Humour

While Nobody Was Looking, the Toilers of Moscow's Municipal Budgetary Institutions from Central Asia Have Begun to Be Replaced by Specialists from Sunny Hindustan

While nobody was looking, the toilers of Moscow's municipal budgetary institutions (the GBU) from Central Asia have begun to be replaced by specialists from sunny Hindustan. The new ethnogeopolitical realities of our courtyard

Architecture · Books · Moscow · Observations · Heritage

Restoration completed of the Toplenin house on Mansurovsky Lane, which Bulgakov visited

The restoration of the Melnikov-Yemelyanova-Toplenin house on Mansurovsky Lane has been completed. This wooden residence on a nineteenth-century stone plinth is commonly called "the Master's house": rumour assigns the Master of The Master and Margarita a little basement flat in this very building.

Moscow · Observations · Heritage · Society · Nature

You know, when they started digging up all of Kolomenskoye in 2024 under the reserve's "improvement" programme, I made a private wager: would they, I wondered, tackle the matters that genuinely call for intervention?

You know, when they started digging up all of Kolomenskoye in 2024 under the reserve's "improvement" programme, I made a private wager: would they, I wondered, tackle the matters that genuinely call for intervention? The destruction, for instance, of the thickets of an invasive species, Sakhalin

Black-and-white photograph of a man standing under a large light bulb in a room surrounded by paintings and sculptures.

Archive · Art · Moscow · People

Room filled with paintings and sculptures in a 1974 photograph by Igor Palmin

The artist Vladimir Yankilevsky in his studio on Preobrazhenskaya Street. Photograph by Igor Palmin, 1974

Archive · Books · Moscow · Observations · Society

At the St Petersburg International Legal Forum, Deputy Minister of Culture Zhanna Alexeyeva announced that a closed repository for literature of a "destructive nature" is being created at the Lenin Library, and called it a "spetskhran"

First of all, it must be explained at once that the spetskhran has existed in the Lenin Library all along; nobody abolished this department with the collapse of the USSR, it was merely the regime of access and the principle by which it is filled that changed. Pornographic and extremist

Archive · Moscow · Society · Humour

Nobody:

Absolutely nobody: Peter I's decree "On Maintaining Cleanliness in Moscow": still in force