Municipal and Other Events in the Durasov House
The Higher School of Economics in Moscow has a spacious geography and the majority of the campuses are situated in the buildings with a rich history. One of these buildings that has become the heart of the new campus at Pokrovsky Boulevard, 11 — the Durasov House — is a former town mansion built at the end of the XVIIIth century in the style of classicism. Today this is a HSE administrative building and it is valuable not only as an architectural monument having lived through many epochs and changed several roles but also as an entity of multidirectional research activities involving the students, employees, graduates and everyone interested.
Due to convenient location, modern design and technical facilities the Durasov House has acted lately as a hospitable ground for the events held by the Department of Cultural Heritage of the City of Moscow, Moscow City Duma and Moscow Public Chamber. The most significant among them are the Annual Youth Forum ‘Heritage’, the dictation (test) on the local studies ‘Moscow Code’ and Yasin (April) International Academic Conference on the Economic and Social Development.
The Annual Youth Forum ‘Heritage’ is aimed at the dissemination of knowledge in the sphere of cultural heritage preserving and the integration of historical monuments into the modern metropolises’ life. This is an educational project of the Moscow Cultural Heritage Department organized in the partnership with the leading Moscow universities. The students and professors from Moscow and various regions of Russia take part in the forum forming inter-disciplinary teams for receiving the project activities experience. In 2021 HSE became the official Forum’s partner: master classes, lectures, business program, awarding ceremony and the closing ceremony took place on the university’s platforms, including the Durasov House. Some 250 students and 50 experts participated in the event.
The local studies test ‘Moscow Code’ in the framework of the Historical and Cultural Heritage Days is held by the Department of Cultural Heritage with the support of Moscow City Duma and Moscow Public Chamber since 2018. Since 2020 more than 11 thousand people took part in the event. The test is going in an online format on the platform ‘Learn Moscow’. In 2022 the test took place in the offline format for the first time. On April 15th, 2022 the HSE employees and students took part in the exclusive test that gave an official start to all the next events. The dictators were the Director of the Cultural Heritage Department of the City of Moscow Mr. Alexey Emelyanov and HSE Vice-Rector Irina Martusevich. The HSE Rector’s Adviser Elena Metelkova became the third among all the participants.
Another significant recent event that took place within the walls of the Durasov House was the XXIIIth Yasin (April) International Academic Conference on the Economic and Social Development. This is the largest event in terms of the number of participants and the representation of the research community among the interdisciplinary social science conferences held in Russia. More than 3,000 people attended the conference, including 250 registered foreign representatives, which is almost 10% more than in 2021, the delegates from the USA, China, Italy, Belarus, Germany, India, Kazakhstan, South Korea, Poland, Turkey, Chile, South Africa and other countries among them.
