Boris Bernaskoni

Boris Bernaskoni (Борис Бернаскони); (born 26 February 1977, Moscow) is a Russian architect, engineer, publisher, the recipient of various architectural awards and a participant in various architectural exhibitions.

He is the founder of the BERNASKONI bureau.

Boris Bernaskoni is a founding member of the Urban Council Board at the Skolkovo Innovation Center in Moscow.

Bernaskoni set up his practice as soon as he graduated in 2000.

He founded an interdisciplinary bureau that works at the intersection of architecture, communication and industrial design.

Matrex

In 2001 he led a "sense analyses" seminar for students of the Moscow Academy of Architecture.

Since 2003 he has been a lecturer at the Moscow Academy of Architecture's Urban Planning department.

In 2004 he has led a project seminar in New York for students of the Moscow Academy of Architecture invited by the Harvard Design School.

Boris Bernaskoni first achieved international recognition in 2008 when he won an international competition for the Perm Museum of Modern Art that was juried by Peter Zumthor and had participants like Coop Himmelbau, Zaha Hadid and Asymptote.

The decision to erect the Hypercube building was made by Russian president Dmitry Medvedev in 2010.

The building is a platform for communication, combining the roles of a public space and generator for new start-up enterprises, and part of a university campus.

The building has its own energy and water supplyautonomous systems.

Hypercube was built in accordance with the green standard "Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design" (LEED v3).

Arc

The Arc pavilion was created especially for Archstoyanie, an architecture festival held in Nikola-Lenivets, Russia.

Arc stands on the border between forest and field.

Its wooden elements are stacked on top of each other with gaps forming rooms and stairs leading up to a viewpoint.

The interior is annually transformed into an art installation.

The materials Arc is made of are to be reused for useful construction or fuel for domestic heating purposes.

Mirror Mongayt

Matrex was built at the Skolkovo Innovation Center in 2015 near the Skoltech Complex.

This project provides a basis for the development of informational and energy efficient technologies, with a special emphasis on transparency of space and work.

The mixed-use building combines Class A and startup offices, apartments, the transforming hall, the spiral museum (exhibit spiral), the restaurant.

The truncated pyramid contains an internal space in the form of a giant Matryoshka, or Russian nestling doll.

Yeltsin Centre

A first for Russia, the Yeltsin Center is a presidential centre on the model of US presidential libraries.

It is a social, cultural and educational institution built in the city of Yekaterinburg, birthplace of President Boris Yeltsin.

His Matrex project received high acclaim at the 15th Venice Biennale of Architecture in 2016.

The centre houses a museum (2016's European Museum of the Year), art gallery, educational centre, documentary film centre, bookshop, café and other public facilities.

Due to lack of vacant sites, Bernaskoni redesigned an existing business centre, to which he added a new form.

This was achieved mainly through a curtain wall, covering half the premises in a sheet of steel, perforated with a series of openings displaying rotational symmetry.

The resultant Center is a modest and neutral structure that nevertheless has a visual identity and silhouette distinct from any other building in Yekaterinburg, which the architect has characterized as its “urban supergraphics”.

Hypercube

Hypercube is the first building at the Skolkovo Innovation Center.

In 2019 Bernaskoni participated in several events at the Davos World Economic Forum, talking on transformable architecture in the cities of the future and urban digitalization.

Bernaskoni is Russian and was born in Moscow, but inherits his surname from a family of Swiss-Italian immigrants to Russia in the late eighteenth century.

The Bernasconi family of Lugano had produced many baroque and classical artists, stuccoists and architects who were active across Europe.

Boris's own ancestors came to Russia work on the palaces of Saint Petersburg and its environs, and include such figures as Antonio and Giuseppe Bernasconi.

Bernaskoni graduated in Architecture from the Moscow Academy of Architecture, having studied in the department of "Housing and Social Design Construction" under the supervision of Professors Belov, Khazanov and Pakhomov.