The Mitkovsky freight yard stretches along the northern boundary of the right-of-way of the “Mitkovskaya” rail spur, which feeds into the D3 line, north of the Troika shopping center and the Alekseevsky Monastery; both are clearly visible from the Third Ring Road. The D3 line runs behind them, and farther on, toward Sokolniki, lies the actual site of the future development – a large territory, just under 700 meters long, currently an industrial zone behind a fence, a “gray spot on the city map”. Historically, the Rybinka stream flowed here; a large pond was created on it, apparently for the cloth factory of Captain Vyrodov still back in the 18th century.
Later the territory was granted from the treasury to the Moscow Governor-General Yakov Aleksandrovich Bruce, a great-nephew of Yakov Vilimovich, known as an associate of Peter the Great and a “black magician”. Still later, the estate belonged to Count Rostopchin, the very same under whom Moscow burned in 1812. Under both Bruce and Rostopchin, the estate was no longer a factory but a country residence near Moscow. It was this property that Platon Mitkov, the brother of the Decembrist Mikhail, bought in 1833. His heir sold the land for the railway, and by the end of the 19th century a branch line had formed here, connecting the Ryazan Railway with the Yaroslavl Railway, along with a freight station.
The branch line – as well as the neighboring street, the boulevard in Sokolniki Park, the old and the modern stations, and the freight yard itself – were all named Mitkovsky after the former owners. The pond was filled in shortly after 1910. The yard functioned within the railway system throughout the 20th century and was closed in 2018.
The Ostozhenka architects began work on the site by winning an invitation-only competition. Then, in the course of developing the project, they produced many more variations – honestly, a whole bunch, and I haven’t even seen them all; roughly a dozen versions of volumetric composition.
However, height is not the project’s only distinguishing feature. There are plenty of high-rise projects in Moscow, especially now. In this case, however, the Ostozhenka team focused on several key aspects: variation in building heights; careful shaping of the skyline; permeability of the site for the city – linking the new complex to the surrounding urban fabric; the environment of the lower levels, the pedestrian perception level, including that of a city dweller who might wander inside, since the internal park is planned to be open to everyone at least to some extent; and the “memory of the place”: the ponds and the stream.
From the very beginning, the site inspired us with its unique conditions and rich history. The territory felt like something concealed, overlooked for a long time – right in the heart of the city. The place has a deep historical background: the Bruce / Rostopchin estate, an entire chain of ponds along the Rybinka River – and we love rivers; they are a recurring theme in our work and have followed us through many projects ever since the Moscow River competition, when we proposed uncovering all of Moscow’s rivers. In this case, the river defined the landscape and even the routing of the railway, which, as often happens in Moscow, follows the flat relief of river valleys.
The echoes of the estate’s lost grandeur – when Derzhavin once visited Rostopchin here – had a profound influence on us. This is how the idea of an inner park with artificial ponds emerged, placed above the collector that carries the real Rybinka River beneath it.
For quite a long time, starting from the competition stage, we were convinced that all high-rise development should be placed along the railway; beyond it, a shared park with a promenade along the ponds; and beyond that, with an exit to Shumkina Street, the school. A clear, straightforward composition. But something didn’t quite come together: the row of towers began to feel dull and monotonous, the park seemed somehow incomplete, squeezed between the school fence and the access road along the residential buildings, and the school itself was shaded by our housing blocks. We went to show the proposal to Moscow’s Chief Architect, Sergey Kuznetsov. And he said – quite unexpectedly for me: what’s so good about placing the school along the street? It’s noisy, and you’ll have to fence it off anyway – the territory must be enclosed. Try placing low-rise buildings along the street with two accent towers: you’ll get a proper street frontage and active ground floors. And the school can take the plot from which the housing is removed. Make a swap, guys.
I was completely unprepared for such a reversal of the composition. But the very next day we reworked the model, repositioned the school (though we had to shift the planned internal street), and most importantly, an inner park with a pond emerged, surrounded by a ring of towers. After that, everything fell into place: the dynamic silhouette, the cascading terraces, the active balcony theme. And the tallest towers of the business center found their most natural position by the Mitkovo D3 station. Our inner park became part of a pedestrian route linking the station’s second exit with Sokolniki Park.
The echoes of the estate’s lost grandeur – when Derzhavin once visited Rostopchin here – had a profound influence on us. This is how the idea of an inner park with artificial ponds emerged, placed above the collector that carries the real Rybinka River beneath it.
For quite a long time, starting from the competition stage, we were convinced that all high-rise development should be placed along the railway; beyond it, a shared park with a promenade along the ponds; and beyond that, with an exit to Shumkina Street, the school. A clear, straightforward composition. But something didn’t quite come together: the row of towers began to feel dull and monotonous, the park seemed somehow incomplete, squeezed between the school fence and the access road along the residential buildings, and the school itself was shaded by our housing blocks. We went to show the proposal to Moscow’s Chief Architect, Sergey Kuznetsov. And he said – quite unexpectedly for me: what’s so good about placing the school along the street? It’s noisy, and you’ll have to fence it off anyway – the territory must be enclosed. Try placing low-rise buildings along the street with two accent towers: you’ll get a proper street frontage and active ground floors. And the school can take the plot from which the housing is removed. Make a swap, guys.
I was completely unprepared for such a reversal of the composition. But the very next day we reworked the model, repositioned the school (though we had to shift the planned internal street), and most importantly, an inner park with a pond emerged, surrounded by a ring of towers. After that, everything fell into place: the dynamic silhouette, the cascading terraces, the active balcony theme. And the tallest towers of the business center found their most natural position by the Mitkovo D3 station. Our inner park became part of a pedestrian route linking the station’s second exit with Sokolniki Park.
So, inspired by the history of the estate-dacha with its ponds, and also proceeding from a planning constraint – namely the collector with the stream that runs along the longitudinal axis of the site and on which construction is prohibited – the architects proposed, first and foremost, to make a public space with a pond, or even several ponds, and turn it into the main axis. It opens up between the towers and is publicly accessible, as is customary in large, urbanistically significant contemporary residential complexes. The space is pedestrian in nature. Through the internal park, it will be possible to walk straight through from Sokolniki to the station.
The ponds themselves are shown by Ostozhenka only in an outline version – the site is currently being handled by the UTRO bureau. However, they promise to preserve the idea.
I should note that in the sketch version the ponds are deliberately natural and soft: parts of the banks are overgrown with grass, and the embankments and piers are entirely wooden. One would hope it stays that way. A fragment – even if artificially created in origin, but natural in appearance – of nature would offset the inevitable rigidity – no matter how you work with materials – of a large residential complex as a given. This “givenness” of ours needs such “shadows”.
The selection of Ostozhenka Architects and the formulation of the brief were the result of close collaboration with the city and a desire to create a product that fully responds to the context and the needs of future residents. We shaped the assignment with careful attention to numerous product and architectural nuances in order to maximize the location’s advantages – its equal proximity to the park, the metro, and the diameter line.
The project implements a kind of territorial UX design, zoning the space from the business quarter at the entrance to the residential and educational complex, with a strong emphasis on views. It was essential for us to reflect the historical context of the Sokolniki district, expressed through red-brick and terracotta façades – an approach in which we were fully aligned with the architects.
Our approach is human-centered: we are not selling square meters, but a unique lifestyle, a distinct “Sokolniki code” tailored to a family-oriented yet fashion-conscious audience. The club infrastructure was carefully designed and includes children’s and sports facilities, coworking spaces, and more. The main highlight, however, is a multifunctional art space. It is intended for exhibitions, workshops, and meetings with artists and writers, fostering the formation of an active residents’ community. We aimed to create highly inviting grand lobbies and public areas that work for people and continuously adapt to their evolving needs.
The project implements a kind of territorial UX design, zoning the space from the business quarter at the entrance to the residential and educational complex, with a strong emphasis on views. It was essential for us to reflect the historical context of the Sokolniki district, expressed through red-brick and terracotta façades – an approach in which we were fully aligned with the architects.
Our approach is human-centered: we are not selling square meters, but a unique lifestyle, a distinct “Sokolniki code” tailored to a family-oriented yet fashion-conscious audience. The club infrastructure was carefully designed and includes children’s and sports facilities, coworking spaces, and more. The main highlight, however, is a multifunctional art space. It is intended for exhibitions, workshops, and meetings with artists and writers, fostering the formation of an active residents’ community. We aimed to create highly inviting grand lobbies and public areas that work for people and continuously adapt to their evolving needs.
The school building, composed of three volumes united by four-story connectors and multi-height atriums, is located in the western part, on an “appendix” adjoining Lobachika Street. A new internal street, conceived in the project as an extension of 3rd Rybinskaya Street, makes an S-shaped bend, separates the school plot from the residential buildings – though it is unlikely to be heavily trafficked – and then runs between the residential towers and the railway toward Rusakovskaya Street.
This internal street separates the residential buildings from the D3 line; the buildings are also shifted slightly northward, forming an elongated urban greenway. In its central section, begins an off-street pedestrian crossing over the railway tracks toward the Troika shopping mall and the Alekseevsky Monastery.
Each of the five residential blocks includes a low-rise podium section and a high-rise tower, at heights of 77, 90, and 142 meters. Beneath each, there are two levels of underground parking. The ground floor is neatly given over to retail – cafés, salons, shops – as well as the residential lobbies. Higher up, there are residential floors; the unit mix is shown in a handsome puzzle-like diagram. The top floor is also carefully reserved for penthouses with slightly increased ceiling heights and a glass “crown” rising along the tower’s perimeter, which conceals the engineering equipment.
The project’s key design device is the terraced, stepped end walls of the buildings: large, three-story steps form entire “cascades”, occupying mainly the middle height zone, though in some places they descend all the way to the park. These terraced parts give the towers an asymmetrical silhouette of a “step”, a leg set aside, or a skirt billowing in the wind.
The most sculptural parts of the façades are also concentrated in this middle, terraced zone. According to the architects, they aimed to wrap the buildings “as if with a scarf”. And that is exactly how it turned out: the verticals of the towers are intersected by textured horizontals. The lower seven floors are rather even, though not flat; the middle, when seen from afar, is “rough”; the top is even smoother, glossy, and glassy.
Egor Korolyov and Anastasia Talaeva, architects, Ostozhenka
We believe that this project allowed us to propose a fresh and truly distinctive approach to working with balconies. Traditionally, balconies are most often placed in the lower thirds of a building, closer to the ground. We, however, boldly lifted them into the middle zone of the towers, creating the effect of a kind of “scarf” wrapping around the façade.
The balconies not only shape the building’s unmistakable identity, but also provide a functional advantage: it is at these mid-level elevations that the finest panoramic views open up – toward the city, Sokolniki Park, and our own internal park. Unlike the upper floors, where conditions can be excessively windy, these levels offer a more humane summer environment, allowing residents to fully enjoy the surrounding landscape. Although this solution increased construction costs, it became our main architectural victory, captivating the client and even the city’s mayor, and ultimately defining the project’s uniqueness and recognizability.
The balconies not only shape the building’s unmistakable identity, but also provide a functional advantage: it is at these mid-level elevations that the finest panoramic views open up – toward the city, Sokolniki Park, and our own internal park. Unlike the upper floors, where conditions can be excessively windy, these levels offer a more humane summer environment, allowing residents to fully enjoy the surrounding landscape. Although this solution increased construction costs, it became our main architectural victory, captivating the client and even the city’s mayor, and ultimately defining the project’s uniqueness and recognizability.
That said, the bands are not evenly distributed everywhere. Yes, above the 7th-8th floor the “scarf” begins, and the textured weaving envelops almost the entire volume. At the same time, where the towers are taller, there are more textured bands. The relief varies: sometimes sharp, sometimes rounded; sometimes intense, and sometimes subdued. The architects, in their own words, sought to propose many variations within a single idea. And indeed, there are quite a lot of them.
Since the word “scarf” has already come up, I will allow myself to compare this idea to fabric. All the more so since everyone is accustomed to speaking of “urban fabric” these days. In this case, however, it is not quite that: the figurative solution itself is woven like a textile, though not in two but in three dimensions.
In any fabric, there are warp and weft. Here, the warp is formed by the volumetric composition, the variation in heights, the rhythm, and several “layers” of rotational symmetry. But not only that – there is also color: in the project, almost as in a textile, brick terracotta and white are interwoven, with an occasional addition of black-brown. All three make up the familiar palette of urban outskirts at the junction of old industrial zones and modernist quarters: brick and panels.
All of this is set against glass, a contemporary and unifying material.
Looking at the birds-eye view images, it is not hard to notice how the white buildings line up into broken yet distinct lines – and how they continue, yes with greater height, but continue nonetheless, the surrounding development. How the red buildings find echoes in the nearby mass of trees – not as large as they themselves are, but also volumetric.
I think many have grown tired of the metaphor of “weaving” new buildings into the surrounding context. And yet that is exactly what is happening here. It is evident that the architects did a great deal precisely in order to “weave” them in: to respond, to reflect on a new level, to find a rhyme, and to build an interaction.
In such a rhymed approach to everything, Ostozhenka’s specialty is well reflected. They cannot be called outright pioneers of the multi-level city, with podiums, tiering, tower dominants rising above quarters – this is a long history, with its own heroes and its own advocates. Still, the architects of Ostozhenka have never stood aside from either the discussion or the practice of urban-planning work with large formations. In this case, in the project CODE Sokolniki, we see a new step in developing the theme. What is so important about it? First of all, perhaps, important is the fact that the towers and the low-rise blocks are not completely separated, but neither are they fused into one. The “scarves” make it possible to balance on the edge: not to draw overly rigid lines of fragmentation, while preserving the integrity of the solution, yet also not to turn the buildings into “icebergs”.
Let us examine the northwestern corner building, located closer than the others to the park entrance – a four-minute walk; its site is currently occupied by the sales office – and therefore it reaches deeper than the others into the urban surroundings.
It is more enclosed than the others; in its layout it echoes the semi-perimeter frames of the 1970s (sic!) in its surroundings. It is entirely red-brick. In both respects, it is conservative. Seven-story sections along the street hold the height, forming an urban frontage; meanwhile, the one that turns inward toward the pond descends in a cascade of terraces. And at the corner a tower rises, quite bold and uncompromising, yet divided into several levels. The upper one is glass. With diagonal, crenellation-like screens. A hint of a fortress, romantic – and I should say that such a hint can be unearthed in more than one Ostozhenka project. Still, it is a fairly subtle, light hint.
We can see a similar picture in the neighboring building on Shumkina Street, formerly Mitkova. Here the glass crown is even more jagged: it “guesses the tune” and picks it up. And the adjoining transverse building is already white and entirely stepped. It echoes the red terraces of its neighbor and “re-sings” it in its own way.
And so it goes on: similar and not similar, and it seems the rhythm is the same and the theme is the same, yet from one building to the next you can find something new. A new angle. A feature. A nuance.
The architects are right: everything here is tied to balconies. Wide triangular projections and projections with diamond-shaped tapers, white asymmetrical rounded bands and transparent glass railings carried forward on a thin white bridge; glass triangular bay windows framed by vertical ribs. I am sure I have not listed everything. Yes, simple balconies alternate with French ones.
But most of all – and this is noticeable – the architects are captivated by the façade with white semicircular balconies. It was planned that the semicircles would be arranged in a checkerboard pattern, but then it became known that, according to contemporary marketing notions, balconies cannot be made in children’s rooms. They were replaced with small projections; the “fabric” became more complex, but perhaps did not lose its attractiveness.
This façade went to the 21-story section, the transverse white “wing” of the tower on Shumkina Street.
Another nuance is the asymmetrical entrance frames, supplemented by columns of “diamond rustication”. Behind glass, in the lobby interior. They continue the façade piers, but in their own way.
It would seem that everything about entrance loggias has already been invented, yet from time to time something not quite familiar does pop up.
The business center by the D3 station may turn out to be the tallest, up to 200 meters high. It inherits the “walking” silhouette of the residential towers, though in a somewhat different way. The glass towers – still entirely hypothetical for now, but already drawn – occupy a smaller plot and do without a courtyard; on the other hand, they have four levels of underground parking and three floors of a shopping center, also quite appropriate next to a transport hub, in the stylobate. In essence there is one tower, but two volumes; they have “stuck together” around a shared elevator core. The southern one has its western façade slanted, and the northern one – its eastern. There you have a laconic standing-and-walking form. Stable-yet-dynamic and distantly reminiscent of the puzzles of our childhood.
There is no need to say much about the apartment mix: these days it is mostly product managers and marketers who are responsible for it anyway. And a person buying an apartment looks at everything with different, quite special eyes. It’s a pity there are few four-room units, but that’s a feature of the market. One can note that the larger apartments are grouped toward the scenic end walls and terraces, but that is a standard professional technique. It is curious how studios and one-room apartments adjoin along a zigzagging wall; this is sensible, as it allows the kitchen space to be defined.
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What is required of architects in a project of this scale is something else. No, not to increase or decrease the height or the amount of usable floor area – that is not their job at all and not their responsibility. The project parameters are rather a given, which one can influence only within a very limited range. The architect’s task is to creatively interpret the project within those parameters. To add creative energy – here boldness, there detail, here variety, there wholeness. To take, if possible, a step forward along this path. To propose an idea. Here I like most of all the idea of “weaving in”. Not everything can be interwoven, and even less so woven in, and it is in no way possible to completely hide a large object. Nor is it necessary. However one can indeed apply one’s own energy to the task of making the interweaving reasonable and vivacious.
