HSE’s Big Move: With Opening of New Campus, Numerous Faculties to Relocate

This summer and autumn, many HSE faculties will be changing their addresses. Now that Pokrovka has been opened after reconstruction, the Faculty of Economic Sciences will be moving there from Shabolovka. Also joining the economists will be members of the Faculty of Computer Science, which has been located on Kochnovsky Street. The Faculty of Business and Management, meanwhile, will be leaving its current location on Kirpichnaya Street and moving to Shabolovka.

A Campus in the City Center

Faculties previously located on Kochnovsky and Kirpichnaya streets are moving to the city center. One of the faculties of the Moscow City Pedagogical Institute, which had previously ceded buildings on Armyansky Lane to HSE’s School of Psychology and buildings on Bolshaya Ordynka Street to the Faculty of World Economy and International Affairs, will in turn be moving to Kochnovsky. HSE is repaying the city its debts with some delay; it was through an exchange with Moscow two years ago that HSE received these (and other) buildings.

HSE University is thus gradually consolidating its campus in Moscow’s city center: and if we want to remain in the city center, we cannot do it on one site. The University nonetheless remains a network of complexes reachable from one another by walking or taking the metro. The door-to-door distance between HSE academic buildings should be no more than 30 minutes. Is this a lot or a little? Those who have been to large American universities know that to get from one end of campus to the other takes about this much time. But why go all the way to the US? Just visit Moscow State University in Lenin Hills.

After 2019, there will be only one educational building on the HSE campus that is located about 45-60 minutes away from the rest – the MIEM building on Tallinskaya Street.

Buildings on Kirpichnaya and Kochnovsky streets required a commute of up to an hour and half. The rest of HSE’s academic buildings – those located on Myasnitskaya, Pokrovksy, Ordynka, and Shabolovka streets (plus the adjoining Trifonovskaya and Novye Cheryomushki streets) are connected by the orange metro line as well as by tram. Now students will have a new form of entertainment: take a ride around HSE along the boulevards – to Zamoskvorechye District and to Shabolovka and Vavilova!

The only major exception to this is Staraya Basmannaya, which houses HSE’s Faculties of Humanities and Physics (as well as HSE’s newest and hippest cafeterias and libraries). But even Basmannaya (or ‘Basmanka’ as it is often called) is within walking distance to some campuses: it is a 25-minute walk to Pokrovka and a 30-minute walk to Myasnitskaya. It is also a 33-minute metro ride to Ordynka and a 37-minute metro ride to Shabolovka.

Who’s Moving Where? And When?

Some of HSE’s administrative services will now be located at Pokrovka. About half of the University’s administrative services will remain at Myasnitskaya – firstly, the Admissions Office, the Finance and HR offices, the Procurement Office, and the Renovation and Maintenance Office – in short, those which deal with large segments of the university community or external visitors. Myasnitskaya is still the complex located closest to a metro station—it’s 4 minutes on foot from the metro to Myasnitskaya, and 12 minutes from the metro to Pokrovka.

HSE student organizations will receive a lot of space – both on Myasnitskaya (in the famous hard-to-reach loft located at 18 Myasnitskaya), and on Pokrovka (in the cultural centre).

The relocation of faculties will be completed, of course, by September 1 (however, Faculty of Computer Science may continue working at Kochnovsky until the New Year if necessary). The administrative units of HSE will move in the fall (since they do not have to worry about the timing of classes or exams).

The space currently occupied by administrative units will be taken over by the Faculty of Social Sciences. For the first time, professors and associate professors of the FSN will be allocated their own rooms, and Andrei Melville and his deputies will have offices on the third floor.

The main part of the building located at 3 Krivokolennoy Lane will be occupied by the experimental laboratories of the School of Psychology and Vasily Klucharev’s Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, as well as the Center for Language and Brain headed by Olga Dragoy. A substantial amount of new equipment has been purchased for neuroscientific research, and now more space is needed to accommodate it. For the first time, HSE University will house in one place an entire cluster of experimental laboratories that are from different faculties but united by similar subject matters.

Incidentally, part of the Myasnitskaya building (the 4^th, 5^th, and 6^th floors) will undergo renovation. As it turns out, we studied and worked a lot there, so now the facilities there need to brought up to the HSE standard (anyone who has been to these floors knows this to be true).

The inauguration of the Pokrovka campus to HSE brings another piece of news – the decision to gradually replace classroom furniture. A new standard of comfort and style has been implemented at Pokrovka and now the rest of the University is preparing to meet this standard as well. This year, this initiative will affect buildings of the Faculty of Communications, Media, and Design and the Faculty of Business and Management.

August 02, 2019