Shpagin Plant and Perm State Art Gallery

In December two thousand twenty-five, staff of the Perm State Art Gallery began moving some sixty thousand exhibits here. Chief keeper Irina Nikolaeva was responsible for ensuring that the paintings, porcelain, icons, and sculptures survived the journey undamaged. Even after arrival, the crates were not opened immediately: they waited until their temperature matched the temperature inside the building. Otherwise, moisture could have condensed on the cold objects. Then the collection keepers and restorers unpacked every item, checked its condition, and compared it with the documents.

The hardest things to move were two large sculptures—The Sower and Soviet Sportswomen. They did not fit heightwise into the body of the truck that carried the other works. The museum staff had to order special transport, devise a lifting method, and create a separate fastening system. In February two thousand twenty-six, the move was completed, and on April second the gallery welcomed its first visitors.

Before that, the museum had occupied Spaso-Preobrazhensky Cathedral for ninety-one years. At the end of two thousand twenty-three, staff vacated it and housed the collection for two years in temporary storage at the former Telta Plant. Meanwhile, architect Sergey Tchoban and museum specialists were designing Perm's first building intended as a museum from the outset: with an unloading area for large objects, separate rooms for different collections, restoration workshops, and climate-control equipment.

The site was chosen on the grounds of railway workshops that had appeared long before the gallery. In eighteen seventy-eight, shareholders of the Ural Mining and Factory Railway Company opened a line between Perm and Yekaterinburg. For its first twenty-eight years, it remained separate from the country's general rail network. Trains brought metal and other products from factories in the Urals to the Kama, where cargoes were transferred onto river vessels. That is why engineers placed the railway station and repair workshops right beside the pier.

A steam locomotive passed through the assembly shop on rails, while parts were brought to it along three perpendicular narrow-gauge tracks. Because of this, the original layout of the workshops resembled the Cyrillic letter Sh. There were boiler-making, forge, foundry, mechanical, railcar, and carpentry departments—twelve production units in all.

The Shpagin in the name is Aleksei Alekseevich, not weapons designer Georgy Shpagin. Aleksei worked in these workshops as a planer operator, then was elected a deputy to the Second State Duma by the worker-voter group of Perm Governorate. In the nineteen twenties, the enterprise was named after its former employee, and the creators of the cultural space kept the name after the locomotive repair plant closed.

Architects restored three old factory buildings and connected them by covered passageways to a new five-story volume clad in copper. Behind this facade are movable mesh racks on rails: the collection keepers placed the paintings on them after that move.