The story
The centerpiece of this Urals museum is a structure set inside the building itself: the Kasli cast-iron pavilion, a black lacework hall assembled from more than 1,500 iron pieces by the foundry workers of Kasli, a nearby ironmaking town.
They built it for the 1900 World's Fair in Paris, where its Russian-modernist forms won the Grand Prix and a gold medal. Cast iron was the region's everyday trade, and here the metal used for stoves and railings was worked into something fine enough to look like wrought filigree. Much of it was lost after the fair, and restoring the pavilion took from 1957 until 1986.
Around it the museum holds Russian painting and a deep collection of Urals decorative iron and carved stone, the output of a mining region that turned its raw materials into art. It is thought to be the only iron pavilion of its kind kept inside a museum.
