Arseny Pekurovsky spent his early childhood in Soviet Moscow, peering out the window of his family’s block flat. Migrating from the Soviet city to American suburbia remains a grounding experience for his art, generating questions about displacement, belonging, assimilation, and interiority. These questions map themselves onto his design work and his research into spatial theory. Questions such as: What is the psychic differentiation between the interior and exterior? What constructs interiority? How do the skins of the interior inflect on the way we live? Speculating on the relationship between the individual and the collective, and influenced by his mixed cultural heritage, he is interested in how interior space is constructed in various cultural epistemes and across different belief systems. He has explored spatial interiority in several projects: San Francisco Affordable Housing Competition (2020) proposed development typologies and policies to create shared living rooms within the interior of city blocks to integrate affordable housing with neighborhoods by building on small lots. In And Out (2024) uses lenticular projection to translate a domestic space into a gallery and explores the sensation of being simultaneously inside and outside. Together and Apart (2025) is an immersive installation that inverts interior and exterior and creates a phenomenological space of movement between two interiors, urban and suburban.
Along with his own work, he has pursued creative and experimental research projects with Dream The Combine, Farzin Farzin, Simone Kearney Studio, Arquitetura da Convivencia (ArC), Casa Floresta - Indigenous Cultural Action, Peter Eisenman, Cornell Realtime Urbanism Lab, Cornell Circular Construction Lab, Cornell Regenerative Architecture Lab, as well as projects in partnership with the Onondaga Nation through Cornell’s Rural Humanities and Council for the Arts grants such as the Haudenosaunee Voices exhibition. Among the projects he has worked on are the Metropolitan Museum of Art Contemporary Wing competition with David Chipperfield and Deborah Berke, the 2021 J. Irwin and Xenia S. Miller Prize at Exhibit Columbus, the 2022 NY Architectural League Prize, the 2022 Philadelphia Navy Yard redevelopment plan, and the 2025 New York State Energy Research and Development Authority grant for experimental timber construction. His work has been shown at Cornell University, New York City Hall, Architectural League of New York, and Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Arseny has taught architecture at Cornell AAP. His writing, drawings and photography have appeared in various publications, including Log Journal and Architectural Design.
Contact:
apekurovsky[at]gmail.com
+1-952-220-4308