The Strelka Pakgauzy (warehouses) are two 19th-century metal frames located at 21 Strelka Street (buildings Zh and I) in Kanavino, on the cape at the confluence of the Oka and the Volga (Strelka). They have been converted into a concert hall and an exhibition hall and opened to the public in the summer of 2022. The lattice trusses were manufactured at the Saint Petersburg Metal Plant in 1882 for the Main Building of the 15th All-Russian Industrial and Art Exhibition in Moscow, and in 1896 were transported to Nizhny Novgorod for the 16th All-Russian Exhibition. After the exhibition closed, the frames were purchased by the Saint Petersburg steamship company Nadezhda, which between 1900 and 1902 used them to construct fireproof goods warehouses at the Siberian Wharf of the Nizhny Novgorod Yarmarka. Clad in brick, they stood as port warehouses for more than a century. The structures were discovered in 2015 during preparations for the FIFA World Cup; following a dispute over demolition, they were granted heritage status and restored. Today they represent a rare example of exhibition metalwork from the century before last being adapted into a functioning cultural venue.

Metal of Two Exhibitions

The metal frames were designed by engineers German Yegorovich Pauker and Ivan Alekseyevich Vyshnegradsky for the Main Building of the 15th All-Russian Industrial and Art Exhibition of 1882 in Moscow; they were manufactured by the Saint Petersburg Metal Plant. The columns are assembled from angle iron and metal strips joined with rivets. The structures are older than the Eiffel Tower.

When Nizhny Novgorod was preparing to host the 16th All-Russian Industrial and Art Exhibition of 1896, part of the Main Building's pavilions were transferred from Moscow "in the interests of economy" and reassembled on site. The exhibition, which became the largest showcase in the empire and was held alongside the Nizhny Novgorod Yarmarka, was attended by Emperor Nicholas II.

An Exhibition Pavilion Bought by Steamship Merchants

After the 1896 exhibition closed, there were no plans to transport the circular Main Building any further: dismantling and reassembling its components would have been prohibitively expensive, and the pavilion was expected either to be sold for scrap or purchased by the Nizhny Novgorod yarmarka merchants. Occupying five desyatinas of city land, the building stood in the way of completing the layout of Exhibition Garden — today's Park of 1 May. In July 1900, the Nizhegorodsky Listok reported that the central building had been sold to the Nadezhda company for 115,000 rubles; in the documents, the purchase is consistently recorded as having been made directly from the Ministry of Finance, on whose balance sheet the pavilion stood.

The reasoning was purely practical: the construction regulations for the Siberian Wharf required that wooden stalls be replaced by fireproof warehouses by 15 July 1905, and restricted each warehouse to 40 sazhen in length, 10 in width, and 2 in height. The ready-made components of the exhibition framework, as the company wrote, would allow "the entire construction to be completed in no more than a year and a half." The initial design, produced under the direction of engineer-technologist A. I. Ventskovsky, who headed the technical and economic department of Nadezhda, proposed several enormous galleries 23 sazhen wide, joined into a single building under a common dome. The application, submitted on 14 August 1900, was categorically rejected by Governor P. F. Unterberger: the design conflicted with the Imperially approved plan for the Siberian Wharf, with the ruling of the commission that had set the maximum warehouse width at ten sazhen, and with the mandatory regulations on the intervals between warehouses.

Revised drawings were submitted by A. A. Zeveke to the yarmarka office on 5 September 1900. The Yarmarka Committee, on 7 September, approved the construction of only nine small warehouses, and the permit issued on 5 December 1900 authorized the company to build "iron single-unit storage sheds only." The dispute over five large sheds reached the Ministry of Internal Affairs: on 1 February 1901, its Technical and Construction Committee, chaired by architect E. I. Zhieber, raised no objections to the structures themselves but deemed the large warehouses a fire hazard and restricted the stacking height to two sazhen. On 17 March 1901, the company's board gave a formal undertaking not to stack cargo higher than two sazhen and not to add a second floor, after which, in May 1901, the yarmarka office issued a second permit — for the "temporary erection" of the large sheds, pursuant to a telegram from the Ministry of Internal Affairs.

Layout and Dimensions

Fourteen sheds of two types were constructed from the pavilion's components; the company appears to have completed all construction by the time of the 1902 yarmarka. The nine smaller sheds had a width of 7.05 sazhen (approximately 15 m) between foundation axes, and a length ranging from 21 to 35 sazhen. The five larger ones were described by the company itself as iron-columned canopies, 23.4 sazhen (approximately 50 m) wide; the ridge of the central section rose 7.71 sazhen — nearly 16.5 m — above floor level. Survey measurements taken by restorers a century later recorded a maximum height of 16.57 m, consistent with the design ridge height of the historic trusses. Technical supervision of construction was initially carried out by transport engineer K. I. Karas and city architect I. I. Bukovsky, and from March 1901, Bukovsky was replaced by academician of architecture V. P. Tseidler.

On 24 May 1908, a Council of Ministers decree established a liquidation commission for the Nadezhda company, to which all its assets were transferred, and the fireproof warehouses passed to new owners.

As Part of the Gorky River Port

In 1929 the yarmarka was closed as a socially alien institution, and its site was taken over by the Gorky River Cargo Port, which for eight decades served as a strategic transport hub. In the early 1930s, port construction got under way at Strelka: the Volga's first improved quays appeared here, with vertical walls of monolithic concrete on pile foundations. In the 1930s, two reinforced-concrete pakgauzy, designed by the architectural bureau of the People's Commissariat of Water Transport under the direction of A. Z. Grinberg, were erected along the Oka. For more, see the article Gorky River Port.

The iron sheds became ordinary storage buildings within the port complex: the lattice frames were enclosed with silicate-brick walls, fitted with slate roofs, and from the outside the structures looked like standard port hangars. The number of surviving exhibition buildings dwindled, though sources disagree on the details: some accounts state that four sections of the pavilion were moved into the port and that by 1943 only two remained; others indicate that six pakgauzy were still standing here in the 1940s. After the reconstruction of the 1960s, two survived: they were shifted approximately one hundred metres and partially dismantled.

The 2015 Discovery and the Preservation Dispute

The openwork structures inside the unremarkable warehouses of the disused port were discovered in 2015, when the city began preparing for the FIFA World Cup and started dismantling the cargo port's buildings. The first to notice the mismatch between "form" and "content" was Nizhny Novgorod architect D. V. Plekhanov: he compared the surviving illustrative material and, on the basis of a comparative analysis, suggested that sections of the central building of the 1896 exhibition had once been moved to the Strelka. The suggestion was backed by T. P. Vinogradova, I. S. Agafonova, and other researchers, and the research of V. V. Krasnov in the Central Archive of the Nizhny Novgorod Region (fund 489, inventory 286) confirmed the theory with files from the Yarmarka office.

The warehouses were originally slated to be demolished along with the other port buildings. On December 13, 2016, a petition to protect the site was submitted to the regional government, and in late December the Nizhny Novgorod Region Office for the State Protection of Cultural Heritage Sites placed the warehouses on the state register as having the features of a cultural heritage site (CHS), under the name "Metal Structures of the Pavilions That Were Part of the Main Building of the 16th All-Russian Industrial and Art Exhibition of 1896." On December 30, 2016, activists launched a petition addressed to Sergey Kiriyenko, First Deputy Head of the Presidential Administration; the urban preservation movement "Spasgrad" also spoke out in favor of preserving the structures. The day before, on December 29, the owner had begun dismantling one of the port cranes on the Strelka.

In 2017 the frames were stripped of their brick walls and asbestos-cement roofs, with the decision made to preserve the metal itself; at the same time, two reinforced-concrete warehouses along the Oka were demolished. In 2018 the structures received the status of a cultural heritage site of regional significance — "metal structures of the pavilions of the Central Building of the All-Russian Exhibitions of 1882 and 1896."

Restoration and Design

The adaptation concept was developed by the architectural firm SPEECH under the direction of Sergey Choban; design took place in 2019–2020, and construction in 2021–2022.

The solution is that inside each historic frame a self-contained glazed volume has been built, set back 1,800 mm from the old trusses around the perimeter, so the historic structure remains visible from both outside and inside. The ridge of the historic trusses rises to 16.57 m, while the ridge of the new roof rises to 13.3 m; the total area of the two buildings is 3,338.15 sq. m, of which Building Zh is 1,745.5 sq. m and Building I is 1,592.6 sq. m.

In the summer of 2020, emergency stabilization work was carried out at the site — anti-corrosion treatment and conservation of the structures. In December 2020, the restoration client, the autonomous nonprofit organization "Center 800," announced a request for proposals for work to preserve the site, with an initial contract price of 660 million rubles; the development of the design documentation was valued at 32.4 million rubles.

The Concert Hall and Exhibition Hall

The concert hall in Building Zh opened on June 2, 2022; the opening was announced by Governor Gleb Nikitin. Behind the stage is a panoramic glass wall with a view of the Strelka and the city; the hall's acoustics were handled by the company Acoustic Group. The first to perform on the new stage was the musicAeterna orchestra under the direction of Teodor Currentzis. Sources give differing figures for the hall's capacity: 426 seats according to most publications, 430 according to the cultural center's official website.

The exhibition hall in Building I opened in the same summer of 2022. The concert venue is operated by the Pushkin Nizhny Novgorod State Opera and Ballet Theater, and the exhibition venue by the Nizhny Novgorod State Art Museum.

In the first six months of operation, the Pakgauzy hosted more than twenty concerts and exhibitions, attended by over 41,500 residents and visitors of the city. The halls are open Tuesday through Sunday from 12:00 to 21:00. The project was awarded a silver diploma at the international "Zodchestvo" festival.

See also

Nizhny Novgorod Yarmarka

Gorky River Port

Strelka

Links

Sources

  1. packhouses.strelkapark.ru — Pakgauzy — Official website of the Pakgauzy cultural center (archive)
  2. Nizhegorodskaya Pravda — How the pakgauzy at Strelka were revived and became a focal point (archive)
  3. archrevue.ru — Architectural Bulletin — The Pakgauzy of Nizhny Novgorod (archive)
  4. NIA "Nizhny Novgorod" — NTA-Privolzhye — The pakgauzy at the Nizhny Novgorod Strelka have been registered by the state as possessing the attributes of cultural heritage sites (archive)
  5. Nizhegorodskaya Pravda — A concert hall has opened in the pakgauzy at Strelka in Nizhny Novgorod (archive)
  6. redeveloper.ru — The pakgauzy at Strelka, Nizhny Novgorod, Russia (archive)
  7. nn-tourist.ru — Tourism portal of Nizhny Novgorod Region — Pakgauzy (archive)
  8. Nizhegorodskaya Pravda — More than 41,500 people attended concerts and exhibitions at the Pakgauzy cultural center (archive)
  9. GIPERNN — GiperNN — From port to park: 10 reasons not to recognize Strelka in Nizhny Novgorod (archive)
  10. opentextnn.ru — Otkrytyy Tekst — V. V. Krasnov. On the history of the pakgauzy at the Nizhny Novgorod Strelka (based on documents from TsANO, f. 489, inv. 286) (archive)
  11. archi.ru — Archi.ru — Steel lacework at Strelka (archive)
  12. strelkahistory.tilda.ws — Open Strelka — About Strelka: the history of the territory, the yarmarka piers, and the Gorky River Port (archive)
  13. travelblognn.ru — The ornate pakgauzy at Strelka — a 19th-century cultural heritage site (with photographs of the river port) (archive)
  14. archi.ru — Archi.ru — Strelka for Nizhny Novgorod residents: another chapter (archive)
  15. zem-nn.ru — Zemlya Nizhegorodskaya — In the same league as the Eiffel Tower
  16. prorus.ru — Proyekt Rossiya — Restoration and adaptation to contemporary use of the pakgauzy at Strelka in Nizhny Novgorod (archive)