Image: Pushkin House, London
Alexander Brodsky, the Russian architect and artist associated with the Soviet-era “paper architecture” movement, has redesigned the bookshop at Pushkin House in London. The Bloomsbury cultural centre said the bookshop will reopen to in-person visitors on 30 September 2026, following several months of renovation. It described the project as Brodsky’s first permanent built commission in the United Kingdom.
Pushkin House is an independent cultural centre at 5A Bloomsbury Square, dedicated to Russian culture and language. The organisation was established in 1954 by two generations of Russian émigrés and describes itself as London’s oldest Russian cultural centre. Its activities include exhibitions, talks, performances, community work and a specialist bookshop serving readers in both English and Russian.
Brodsky, born in Moscow in 1955, is widely regarded by Pushkin House as one of the most significant figures in “paper architecture”—a term used for the visionary, often unbuildable conceptual drawings produced by a generation of young Soviet architects from the late 1970s. The movement developed architectural ideas through speculative projects rather than conventional construction, and Brodsky’s practice has continued to combine architectural work with artistic and atmospheric approaches.
His previous connection with Pushkin House came through ‘101st km – Further Everywhere’, a temporary pavilion installed on Bloomsbury Square in 2017 to mark the centenary of the Russian Revolution. The structure presented poetry by 20 writers who had experienced internal exile, emigration or suppression during their lifetimes. The project included poems by figures including Boris Pasternak, Anna Akhmatova, Joseph Brodsky and Osip Mandelstam, alongside lesser-known poets.
In a Pushkin House account of the pavilion, its walls were covered in roofing felt and did not reach the ground; visitors entered by bending down. Inside, reading lights illuminated poems hung along the walls, while projections of railways created a sense of movement and stillness. The project reflected Brodsky’s longstanding interest in pavilions: the same account noted that he had previously built such structures in Venice, Paris, Vienna and Russia.
The renovated bookshop is scheduled to reopen with stated regular hours of 10am to 9pm from Monday to Friday and 10am to 5pm on Saturdays. During the renovation, Pushkin House said that books remained available online for delivery or collection. The shop’s programme includes Russian literature, translations, poetry, history, current affairs, art books, architecture and cultural criticism, as well as books in Russian.
