With a Swedish Accent

To design “Skandinavsky” UP-quarter, FSK “Lider” invited a Swedish architectural firm Semrén & Månsson.

Written by:
Julia Tarabarina, Natalya Muradova
Translated by:
Anton Mizonov

02 August 2017

Object

The UP-quarter “Skandinavsky” is being built three kilometers outside of the Moscow Ring Road, northwest of Mytishchi, on the territory of the former village of Borodino (just one of the several Russian namesakes of the famous village that witnessed the Napoleon battle in 1812). This place is but a 15 minutes’ bus ride away from Medvedkovo metro station. And, although Mytishchi, as is known, is already densely overbuilt, just outside the confines of Moscow’s satellite we see quite a different picture: this land is dominated by villages filled with private residences and forests that are quite abundant despite the proximity of the megalopolis. If we are to broaden our gaze, Mytishchi’s Borodino is but six kilometers away from the Pirogovskoe Lake; next to the village we will find the Khlebnikovsky and Pirogovsky parks, but the closest woodland is a forest belonging to the Mytishchi Forestry Station. As we can see, in spite of its proximity to the Moscow Ring Road (which is definitely a downside by Moscow standards), this place is still quite green and – due to the proximity of the famous Pirogovskoe Lake – almost boasting a resort status. Nearby, a few shopping malls have been built already, and new ones are being built as well. So it comes as no surprise that the FSK “Lider” developers chose this place for the construction of a large housing complex belonging to a new housing format that this company has been recently promoting on the market: formally referring to the comfort-class, it is endowed with a range of extra features that are sure to become a pleasant surprise for the consumer. To design this housing complex, FSK “Lider” invited the Swedish firm Semrén & Månsson – hence the name of “Skandinavsky”. Still, though, there are also Russian architects working for this firm.

Thus, on the twelve hectares of land stretching from north to south alongside the Ostashkovskoe Highway (incidentally, it is this highway that leads to the Pirogovskoe Lake), some forty to ninety meters away from the highway itself, there has already begun the construction of two residential buildings out of planned four, designed to house 80 000 square meters of apartments. These apartments constitute the first stage of construction. The second stage of construction will include another two buildings, a school and a kindergarten.

“This will be a small town yet completely self-sufficient” – says Maria Broman, the chief project architect of Semrén+Månsson. Three large sectional buildings are designed as blocks with an open-circuit plan. “As is known, blocks or “quarters” are becoming a hot trend in Moscow – the architects explain – But in Sweden they never seemed to lose popularity at all. So, in a sense, this is a Scandinavian trait”. However – and this is also common knowledge – the “pure” version of the block town planning is only good for houses no higher than 6 or 8 floors, which makes perfect sense because in this particular instance the planning is of mixed type. The circuits of the blocks are open; the night of the sections varies from 8 to 16 floors making the skyline uneven. It is planned that there will be underground parking garages beneath the three buildings. In front of the side wall of the third building, there is a 16-story centerpiece tower that faces the highway with its slightly tapering southeast corner. There is a two-story property sales office behind it – together with the overland guest parking lot they complete the image of the housing complex as seen from the highway.

zooming — UP-quarter "Skandinavsky" © Semrén & Månsson

Further on north, the highway is separated from the complex by other private residences. One should say that in this particular instance this separation is a rather lucky circumstance. “Skandinavsky” is chiefly oriented toward its own internal boulevard that starts at the tower of Building 4 on the south side and stretches inside the housing complex forming its inside axis. The boulevard is open to vehicles but only ones belonging to residents and their guests. It separates a row of residential buildings and the territory that will be occupied by the second stage of construction: two residential buildings, a kindergarten, a school, and a stadium. In addition, the closed parts of the block are turned on the boulevard and form a city-type building front stretching along it, with cafés, shops, and – this was expressly specified – beauty salons in the first floors. There are no arches in the buildings but the entrance lobbies are designed in such a way that they can be entered from either side: one can enter such a lobby both from the yard and from the street, which significantly increases the porosity of the complex and provides a number of convenient shortcuts. The entire territory will be security guarded, so there will be no risk of evil-meaning strangers penetrating the complex.

Also important is the fact that the first stage that is currently under construction is bordering (almost side by side) on a small coppice, while in its north part there is a small natural creek. In the land organization project, there is a path leading to it which is accessible to all residents. This way, it turns out that the axis of the public space of the UP-quarter “Skandinavsky” is strung between the coppice and the creek – which must provide a diverse range of experiences here.

Working with the façades, the architects tried to “customize” the space as much as possible: the sections are not only of different height but their façades are also designed in different colors – from a reserved “north-European” tone varying from white to gray to yellow beige and brick red. However, the architects stopped short of taking this fashionable technique of imitating a city street to its limit: the façades are laconic and subjugated to a single common theme. “We had sort of a toolbox of different elements: windows, balconies, colors... We would mix them up, and then each section would get its own identity – explains the chief architect of the project Maria Broman – We think that it is important for the residents to be conscious of living, let’s say, in this particular brown house. Second, this individuality of separate buildings is important for the scale of the complex. This way, an impression is created that the complex is a lot smaller than it actually is”.

The reduction of scale is also partially enhanced by the fact that the top and bottom floors are designed differently than the façades of the main part. The buildings get a brick base, this base including three tiers on the side of the boulevard and offering a comfortable city scale to the pedestrian’s eye: a shop window plus two stories. However, the height of the base varies, just as the design of the upper floors does: in Building 3, they are only highlighted with color, and in Buildings 2 and 1 (which are to be built later) the two top floors are united by a slanted metal-sheet wall that gives them a likeness to a somewhat overblown mansard. At some points, the mansards form an elevated ledge, and at some places they alternate with recessions of modernist terraces, which also help the authors to create an illusion of a spontaneously developing city street. Inside the mansard stories, two-level apartments are designed.

The tower of Building 4, which, as we remember, is situated closer to the highway than the other buildings are, is significantly different: it is completely devoid of the light retro-fleur that is distinctively felt in the “quarter” buildings, and, while the quarters are reservedly conservative, the tower can be described as “reservedly innovative”. Its façades are “shrouded” by a mesh of white network – its slim ribs, otherwise sparse but dense where the staircases are, make this volume particularly slender and elegant. The gray color of the sunken-in surfaces forms a background – all this looks a bit like the Renaissance scratch-work technique of adoring façades, only on a significantly greater scale.

The authors also paid a lot of attention to the organization of the adjoining territory. The trees on the boulevard, the children’s playgrounds, the benches and flowerbeds – all this became the “101 kit” of our days, just as vehicle-free yards. The pedestrian zone – the bottom parts of the façades abs the hallway entrances – are elaborated down to the last detail, which is meant to render the immediate, almost tactile, perception of the territory by the people both comfortable and rich in emotion. In addition, the architects also provided for a lot of pleasant little things – for example, the entrance lobbies have not only rooms for go-carts and strollers but also places for washing the pets’ paws after the walk.

As for apartment layouts, the salespeople call them “typically Scandinavian”: square rooms and inbuilt closets. The apartments range from studios to three-room ones, each having a stanza balcony, either sunken in or standing out and glazed. The stanzas come with boxes for air conditioning units – it should be said that their grilles, looking as if they were made of wood, serve as a nice façade decoration. In sectional buildings small corridors are inevitable, while the tower, according to the architects, boasts particularly Swedish layouts: without corridors, with a large kitchen-and-living-room, from where one can get into the bedrooms. None of the apartments have either beating walls or columns inside of them – which will make any possible planning changes much easier.

It is pretty obvious that in Sweden such huge housing complexes are a rare thing to be seen. But if we are to speak about the realities of the Russian cities, and particularly the realities of the Moscow area – it IS built with large-scale housing complexes, and any attempt to give their appearance a noble touch and organize their inside space is already something worth noting – just as the development of the housing market in the direction of UP-quarter ideas, the meaning of which, as proceeds from the very self-explanatory term, consists is “raising” a certain class of housing.

02 August 2017

Headlines now

The Mirror of Your Soul

We continue to publish projects from the competition for the design of the Russian Pavilion at EXPO in Osaka 2025. We are reminding you that the results of the competition have not been announced, and hardly will ever be. The pavilion designed by ASADOV Architects combines a forest log cabin, the image of a hyper transition, and sculptures made of glowing threads – it focuses primarily on the scenography of the exhibition, which the pavilion builds sequentially like a string of impressions, dedicating it to the paradoxes of the Russian soul.

Part of the Ideal

In 2025, another World Expo will take place in Osaka, Japan, in which Russia will not participate. However, a competition for the Russian pavilion was indeed held, with six projects participating. The results were never announced as Russia’s participation was canceled; the competition has no winners. Nevertheless, Expo pavilion projects are typically designed for a bold and interesting architectural statement, so we’ve gathered all the six projects and will be publishing articles about them in random order. The first one is the project by Vladimir Plotkin and Reserve Union, which is distinguished by the clarity of its stereometric shape, the boldness of its structure, and the multiplicity of possible interpretations.

Object

The Fortress by the River

ASADOV Architects have developed a concept for a new residential district in the center of Kemerovo. To combat the harsh climate and monotonous everyday life, the architects proposed a block type of development with dominant towers, good insolation, facades detailed at eye level, and event programming.

Object

In the Rhombus Grid

Construction has begun on the building of the OMK (United Metallurgical Company) Corporate University in Nizhny Novgorod’s town of Vyksa, designed by Ostozhenka Architects. The most interesting aspect of the project is how the architects immersed it in the context: “extracting” a diagonal motif from the planning grid of Vyksa, they aligned the building, the square, and the park to match it. A truly masterful work with urban planning context on several different levels of perception has long since become the signature technique of Ostozhenka.

Object

Generational Connection

Another modern estate, designed by Roman Leonidov, is located in the Moscow region and brings together three generations of one family under one roof. To fit on a narrow plot without depriving anyone of personal space, the architects opted for a zigzag plan. The main volume in the house structure is accentuated by mezzanines with a reverse-sloped roof and ceilings featuring exposed beams.

Object

Three Dimensions of the City

We began to delve into the project by Sergey Skuratov, the residential complex “Depo” in Minsk, located at Victory Square, and it fascinated us completely. The project has at least several dimensions to it: historical – at some point, the developer decided to discontinue further collaboration with Sergey Skuratov Architects, but the concept was approved, and its implementation continues, mostly in accordance with the proposed ideas. The spatial and urban planning dimension – the architects both argue with the city and play along with it, deciphering nuances, and finding axes. And, finally, the tactile dimension – the constructed buildings also have their own intriguing features. Thus, this article also has two parts: it dwells on what has been built and what was conceived

Object

New “Flight”

Architects from “Mezonproject” have developed a project for the reconstruction of the regional youth center “Polyot”(“Flight”) in the city of Oryol. The summer youth center, built back in the late 1970s, will now become year-round and acquire many additional functions.

Object

The Yauza Towers

In Moscow, there aren’t that many buildings or projects designed by Nikita Yavein and Studio 44. In this article, we present to you the concept of a large multifunctional complex on the Yauza River, located between two parks, featuring a promenade, a crossroads of two pedestrian streets, a highly developed public space, and an original architectural solution. This solution combines a sophisticated, asymmetric façade grid, reminiscent of a game of fifteen puzzle, and bold protrusions of the upper parts of the buildings, completely masking the technical floors and sculpting the complex’s silhouette.

Object

Architecture and Leisure Park

For the suburban hotel complex, which envisages various formats of leisure, the architectural company T+T Architects proposed several types of accommodation, ranging from the classic “standard” in a common building to a “cave in the hill” and a “house in a tree”. An additional challenge consisted in integrating a few classic-style residences already existing on this territory into the “architectural forest park”.

Overview

The U-House

The Jois complex combines height with terraces, bringing the most expensive apartments from penthouses down to the bottom floors. The powerful iconic image of the U-shaped building is the result of the creative search for a new standard of living in high-rise buildings by the architects of “Genpro”.

Object

Black and White

In this article, we specifically discuss the interiors of the ATOM Pavilion at VDNKh. Interior design is a crucial component of the overall concept in this case, and precision and meticulous execution were highly important for the architects. Julia Tryaskina, head of UNK interiors, shares some of the developments.

send.project

The “Snake” Mountain

The competition project for the seaside resort complex “Serpentine” combines several typologies: apartments of different classes, villas, and hotel rooms. For each of these typologies, the KPLN architects employ one of the images that are drawn from the natural environment – a serpentine road, a mountain stream, and rolling waves.

send.project

Opal from Anna Mons’ Ring

The project of a small business center located near Tupolev Plaza and Radio Street proclaims the necessity of modern architecture in a specific area of Moscow commonly known as “Nemetskaya Sloboda” or “German settlement”. It substantiates its thesis with the thoroughness of details, a multitude of proposed and rejected form variants, and even a detailed description of the surrounding area. The project is interesting indeed, and it is even more interesting to see what will come of it.

Object

Feed ’Em All

A “House of Russian Cuisine” was designed and built by KROST Group at VDNKh for the “Rossiya” exhibition in record-breaking time. The pavilion is masterfully constructed in terms of the standards of modern public catering industry multiplied by the bustling cultural program of the exhibition, and it interprets the stylistically diverse character of VDNKh just as successfully. At the same time, much of its interior design can be traced back to the prototypes of the 1960s – so much so that even scenes from iconic Soviet movies of those years persistently come to mind.

Object

The Ensemble at the Mosque

OSA prepared a master plan for a district in the southern part of Derbent. The main task of the master plan is to initiate the formation of a modern comfortable environment in this city. The organization of residential areas is subordinated to the city’s spiritual center: depending on the location relative to the cathedral mosque, the houses are distinguished by façade and plastique solutions. The program also includes a “hospitality center”, administrative buildings, an educational cluster, and even an air bridge.

send.project

Pargolovo Protestantism

A Protestant church is being built in St. Petersburg by the project of SLOI architects. One of the main features of the building is a wooden roof with 25-meter spans, which, among other things, forms the interior of the prayer hall. Also, there are other interesting details – we are telling you more about them.

Object

The Shape of the Inconceivable

The ATOM Pavilion at VDNKh brings to mind a famous maxim of all architects and critics: “You’ve come up with it? Now build it!” You rarely see such a selfless immersion in implementation of the project, and the formidable structural and engineering tasks set by UNK architects to themselves are presented here as an integral and important part of the architectural idea. The challenge matches the obliging status of the place – after all, it is an “exhibition of achievements”, and the pavilion is dedicated to the nuclear energy industry. Let’s take a closer look: from the outside, from the inside, and from the underside too.

send.project

Rays of the Desert

A school for 1750 students is going to be built in Dubai, designed by IND Architects. The architects took into account the local specifics, and proposed a radial layout and spaces, in which the children will be comfortable throughout the day.

Object

The Dairy Theme

The concept of an office of a cheese-making company, designed for the enclosed area of a dairy factory, at least partially refers to industrial architecture. Perhaps that is why this concept is very simple, which seems the appropriate thing to do here. The building is enlivened by literally a couple of “master strokes”: the turning of the corner accentuates the entrance, and the shade of glass responds to the theme of “milk rivers” from Russian fairy tales.

send.project

The Road to the Temple

Under a grant from the Small Towns Competition, the main street and temple area of the village of Nikolo-Berezovka near Neftekamsk has been improved. A consortium of APRELarchitects and Novaya Zemlya is turning the village into an open-air museum and integrating ruined buildings into public life.

Object

Towers Leaning Towards the Sun

The three towers of the residential complex “Novodanilovskaya 8” are new and the tallest neighbors of the Danilovsky Manufactory, “Fort”, and “Plaza”, complementing a whole cluster of modern buildings designed by renowned masters. At the same time, the towers are unique for this setting – they are residential, they are the tallest ones here, and they are located on a challenging site. In this article, we explore how architects Andrey Romanov and Ekaterina Kuznetsova tackled this far-from-trivial task.

Object

In the spirit of ROSTA posters

The new Rostselmash tractor factory, conceptualized by ASADOV Architects, is currently being completed in Rostov-on-Don. References to the Soviet architecture of the 1920’s and 1960’s resonate with the mission and strategic importance of the enterprise, and are also in line with the client’s wish: to pay homage to Rostov’s constructivism.

send.project

The Northern Thebaid

The central part of Ferapontovo village, adjacent to the famous monastery with frescoes by Dionisy, has been improved according to the project by APRELarchitects. Now the place offers basic services for tourists, as well as a place for the villagers’ leisure.

send.project

Brilliant Production

The architects from London-based MOST Architecture have designed the space for the high-tech production of Charge Cars, a high-performance production facility for high-speed electric cars that are assembled in the shell of legendary Ford Mustangs. The founders of both the company and the car assembly startup are Russians who were educated in their home country.

Object

Three-Part Task: St. Petersburg’s Mytny Dvor

The so-called “Mytny Dvor” area lying just behind Moscow Railway Station – the market rows with a complex history – will be transformed into a premium residential complex by Studio 44. The project consists of three parts: the restoration of historical buildings, the reconstruction of the lost part of the historical contour, and new houses. All of them are harmonized with each other and with the city; axes and “beams of light” were found, cozy corners and scenic viewpoints were carefully thought out. We had a chat with the authors of the historical buildings’ restoration project, and we are telling you about all the different tasks that have been solved here.

Object

The Color of the City, or Reflections on the Slope of an Urban Settlement

In 2022, Ostozhenka Architects won a competition, and in 2023, they developed and received all the necessary approvals for a master plan for the development of Chernigovskaya Street for the developer GloraX. The project takes into account a 10-year history of previous developments; it was done in collaboration with architects from Nizhny Novgorod, and it continues to evolve now. We carefully examined it, talked to everyone, and learned a lot of interesting things.

Object

A Single-Industry Town

Kola MMC and Nornickel are building a residential neighborhood in Monchegorsk for their future employees. It is based on a project by an international team that won the 2021 competition. The project offers a number of solutions meant to combat the main “demons” of any northern city: wind, grayness and boredom.

Object

A New Age Portico

At the beginning of the year, Novosibirsk Tolmachevo Airport opened Terminal C. The large-scale and transparent entrance hall with luminous columns inside successfully combines laconism with a bright and photogenic WOW-effect. The terminal is both the new façade of the whole complex and the starting point of the planned reconstruction, upon completion of which Tolmachevo will become the largest regional airport in Russia. In this article, we are examining the building in the context of modernist prototypes of both Novosibirsk and Leningrad: like puzzle pieces, they come together to form their individual history, not devoid of curious nuances and details.

Object

A New Starting Point

We’ve been wanting to examine the RuArts Foundation space, designed by ATRIUM for quite a long time, and we finally got round to it. This building looks appropriate and impressive; it amazingly combines tradition – represented in our case by galleries – and innovation. In this article, we delve into details and study the building’s historical background as well.

Object

Molding Perspectives

Stepan Liphart introduces “schematic Art Deco” on the outskirts of Kazan – his houses are executed in green color, with a glassy “iced” finish on the facades. The main merits of the project lie in his meticulous arrangement of viewing angles – the architect is striving to create in a challenging environment the embryo of a city not only in terms of pedestrian accessibility but also in a sculptural sense. He works with silhouettes, proposing intriguing triangular terraces. The entire project is structured like a crystal, following two grids, orthogonal and diagonal. In this article, we are examining what worked, and what eventually didn’t.

​With a Swedish Accent

To design “Skandinavsky” UP-quarter, FSK “Lider” invited a Swedish architectural firm Semrén & Månsson.

With a Swedish Accent