‘The Great East’ is a project of The International Numismatic Club Museum in Moscow depicting Eastern culture through the circulatory system of any civilization. It’s money (coins). Money as an architecture is a stable piece of art, which doesn’t lend itself to rapid destruction and easy damage. Therefore, it is possible to study the history of entire epochs on their basis.
Three halls are three faces of Eastern culture. Among them are an ancient light-stone architecture, a crowded noisy market as a place of crossing different cultures and the last one is a private sacred space.
Our design is inspired by the architecture of the key centers of the Great Silk Road — the cities of Bukhara and Samarkand. ‘The Great East’ exposition is divided into three semantic areas. The first hall ‘Architecture of Time’ represents a conventional architectural structure of the Muslim East. There are exhibited architectural decor fragments of different periods. The second hall reproduces the dome of Toki Sarrafon, a traditional covered bazaar in Bukhara. The third hall ‘Gods and their creatures’, in turn, is designed as a sacred oriental room with panjar grids. The first two halls are equipped with multimedia screens and interactive tools.
Two color schemes are used in the project: sandy-light, ivory (in the first two rooms), and dark, dusty blue (in the third). Laconicity and lightness distinguish the design of this project. Everything balances on nuances, which helps to perceive the exposition more thoughtfully.