Tuesday · August · 11 · 2026
“Without suburbs a city has no centre either.”
— Instructions of Shuruppak
Sun & daylight
The sun rises at 04:54 and sets at 20:18 in Moscow today, giving 15h 23m of daylight. Solar noon is at 12:36.
04:54
Sunrise
12:36
Noon
20:18
Sunset
Midnight
00:36
Sunrise
04:54
Solar noon
12:36
Sunset
20:18
Solar midnight
00:36
Daylight
15h 23m
Daylight runs about 17h 33m around the June solstice and 7h 0m around the December solstice.
Daylight saving time
Moscow does not observe daylight saving time. Clocks stay on UTC+3 all year, so the local time never shifts with the seasons.
Public holidays
Russia has no public holidays in August 2026.
Architecture
Moscow keeps its avant-garde and its imperial monuments on the same streets, and both nearly disappeared in the same decades. Its recent work is largely foreign offices converting what was left of the industrial city.
Completed 2021
Renzo Piano
An arts centre in a power station on the Bolotnaya embankment. Renzo Piano stripped the 1907 building back to its steel frame, glazed it, and raised four blue chimneys that draw fresh air in rather than push exhaust out. The main hall runs the full length as a single top-lit volume with the galleries pushed to the sides. A birch grove was planted where the coal yard had been.
Completed 2017
Diller Scofidio + Renfro
A park and its pavilions beside Red Square, on the site of a demolished hotel. Diller Scofidio + Renfro terraced the ground into four Russian landscapes and set the buildings into those terraces, so their roofs are walking surfaces. A concrete walkway cantilevers seventy metres over the Moscow river without a support beneath it. The buildings are treated as landform, which is why the place reads as topography rather than as a lawn.
Completed 2015
Rem Koolhaas
A museum inside a derelict Soviet restaurant pavilion in Gorky Park. Rem Koolhaas kept the 1968 concrete shell, its damaged tiles and its mosaic, then wrapped the whole thing in translucent polycarbonate held two metres off it. The new envelope lifts at the ground so the building opens on both sides. Preservation here means keeping the ruin visible behind a new layer rather than repairing it.
Completed 1929
Konstantin Melnikov
The architect's own house in the Arbat, built as two intersecting cylinders. Konstantin Melnikov used a lattice brick wall that let him cut over sixty hexagonal windows wherever he wanted without lintels. The studio at the top is lit entirely by those openings, with no main window at all. It was a private experiment built inside a state housing programme, and the state permitted no second one.
Completed 1561
Postnik Yakovlev
The cathedral at the south end of Red Square, built for Ivan the Terrible. Nine separate churches stand on one foundation, each with its own tower, arranged around the tallest at the centre. The coloured domes seen now came in the seventeenth century; the original was largely white and gold. The plan is a diagram of a military campaign rather than a conventional church.