Architectural Therapy

In this issue, we are publishing the contest project of renovating city blocks 32, 33, 34, and 35 on the Vernadskogo Avenue by a consortium of OAO “Mosproject” and OOO “Ginsburg Architects”.

Written by:
Lara Kopylova
Translated by:
Anton Mizonov

13 March 2018

News

The pilot site of the Vernadskogo Avenue

Located in the prestigious and expensive Moscow’s southwest, the renovation site of about 125 hectares and consisting of four soviet-era “micro-districts” 32-35, starts at the “Prospect Vernadskogo” metro station and stretches along straddling both sides of the avenue down to the Lobachevskogo Street. The “sphere of influence” of this area includes the green territory of the Moscow State University of Foreign Affairs, the 50th Victory Anniversary Park and the “Udaltsovskie Ponds”. In addition the boundaries of the site also contain the park of the “Southwest” ponds near the affluent of the Samorodinka River.

zooming — Concept of reorganizing City Blocks 32-33 and 34-35 in the area of the Vernadskogo Avenue. Photofixation of the designed construction © Ginsburg Architects + Mosproject

In 1962, this micro-district (consisting of standard I-515 five-story buildings) was built on a windswept field between the village of Nikolskoe and the manor estate of Vorontsovo – the aerial footage shows the city spilling over the boundaries of the “Stalin” city blocks standing on the Marii Ulyanovoi Street (these had been built but two years earlier). Back in those days, the Vernadskogo Avenue was only roughly marked on the city plan, and finished in a dead end; the main thoroughfares of the nation’s capital being the Leninsky Avenue and the Borovskoe Highway that was still functioning back then. Today’s renovation site takes up about a half of the micro-district’s territory the way it was in 1962-1963: back then, six city blocks were built, currently three and a half are being considered for renovation, the two situated behind the Leninsky Avenue having been torn down and rebuilt still under the Mayor Luzhkov.

It must be said at this point that they started adding extra buildings almost as soon as the micro-district was built – these were 12-story houses. The 2000’s and 2010’s saw the appearance of towers standing along the banks of the ponds, a wall of 25-story buildings built along the edge of the park, and a few more houses 20-plus stories high, part of them meant today to accommodate for the first wave of repopulation.

It must also be said that today the panoramas of the area demonstrate a rather vivid contrast between the five-story affairs and the 25-story giants.

The Footprint Magnet

The main distinctive feature of the proposal by Aleksey Ginsburg and Mosproject is the fact that the architects are treating the existing architectural situation with utmost care; at the exhibition, their project was one of the most contextually respectful ones – even if at the expense of sacrificing some flashiness of the presentation. The architects retain the planning layouts and proceed from the outlines of the five-story buildings in order to avoid cutting the trees – according to estimates it will be possible to retain as much as 77% of the existing vegetation on the renovated site.

And the local residents liked that. During the public hearings, one of the local residents, worried by some issues in the projects by other authors (an automobile road running directly beneath her windows, to name but one) described the Aleksey Ginsburg project as being “more therapeutic”, because it provides for the most delicate treatment of the existing situation. And I cannot blame the local residents either because I lived for two years on the Vernadskogo Avenue in the five-story house right behind the “Zvezdny” movie theater. The trees are truly magnificent there, and another proof of that is a record number of bullfinches in winter and cats in summer (the latter would just crawl into my window on the first floor). I even had a drawing by the artist Andrew Yagubsky depicting these bullfinches and cats, made expressly for the purpose of immortalizing this peculiar urban ecosystem.

Nevertheless, the architects’ proposal does not merely boil down to building within the blueprints of the demolished houses – rather, the model that they propose can be called a hybrid one: where two five-story houses used to stand parallel to one another, seven-story houses of a shorter length appear, while between them arises a lintel of the same height that forms a semi-open urban block. The distance between the five-story houses ranged from 45 to 80 meters, the length of the block being from 60 to 90 meters, and the authors “mine” from this permanent module city blocks of different sizes: sometimes they are small, with “classic” (as might be expected for a seven-story house) yards about 50x70 meters, and sometimes they are large, encompassing not two but four five-story buildings, the latter being contextually grouped closer to the Marii Ulyanovoi Street, where “Stalin” layouts with large yards prevail.

On the corners of the city block towers appear, 14 to 18 stories high, which close the contour, although not completely. Thus, in the stead of the open “stitches” of the micro-districts, placed at different angles, the new housing appears, tied to its vectors, but this time of the city block type, yet spaced out with towers. The city blocks interpret the stitches of the five-story houses; the towers follow the “infill” construction, which, as we remember, started here, mostly on the perimeter, back in the 1970’s. The two systems overlap and form a complex form of mutual subjugation: not all of the towers belong to the city blocks at the same time belonging to the stitches running along the streets. Aleksey Ginsburg describes the end solution as “something in the middle” between historical perimeter-type planning and the open modernist type.

Streets, squares, parks, and functions

In the northwest part of the site, along the fragment of the former Borovskoe Highway, the architects built a number of towers that mark exactly the side ends of the former five-story houses. They face the street with their corners, creating (instead of the construction front that you would expect to see here) a zigzag of little triangular parks: two of them stretch northwest as small promenades, and one becomes the main square – it joins a diagonal driveway, through which it will be possible to walk from the metro station to the Moscow State University of Foreign Affairs, bypassing the busy thoroughfares. The other triangular “ledges” also play the role of mini-squares. All of the ledges have arcs or circles marked on them that bear a distant resemblance with the Catherine the Great squares of Tver and are directly resonant with a large arc-shaped “repopulation” house built on the other side of the former Borovskoe Highway.

This way, the former highway is turned into a boulevard with little parks and squares, the main public urban space, lending itself to romantic walks and cafe visits. From its south part, it borders on the narrow park stretching along the Lobachevskogo Street, and this park is in turn continued by a sports boulevard around the residential towers on the Vernadskogo Avenue – here, behind the thin array of the residential buildings, the authors of the project find room for a fitness center. What the whole thing ends up looking like is a peculiar “horseshoe” of green public spaces with different specialization. They are continued by a park spreading around the ponds on the other side of the avenue – the most peaceful place, almost a full-fledged park. However, in order to tie this whole functionally diverse framework into a single system, the architects had to improve the connection between two major parts of this area.

Building Bridges

In order to do that, the architects propose to replace the overland pedestrian crossing in the south part of the avenue with a bridge equipped with elevators – it must serve the purpose of connecting the sports boulevard with the mini-park spreading around the ponds by forming two interconnected loops of pedestrian and bicycle routes.

Solving the problem of the low transparency of the district so far seems unrealistic: too many fences have been built over the last twenty years, and “opening them up” could be quite a chore. At the same time, speaking to the local residents, the authors of the project came to a conclusion that for the elderly people who live here, the opportunity to reach some important places on foot is extremely important. That’s why they accentuated and strengthened all of the available pedestrian connections, adding, of course, driveways around the new houses.

Architecture of Moderation

As for the architecture of this project as such, the authors describe it as “deliberately conditional”; the houses neutrally look like one another, and there isn’t much of fashionable glass, either. The basic height is seven floors, which is the arithmetic average between the five-story buildings and the nearest “Stalin” houses 9-10 stories high – the latter are obviously addressed by the brownish color of the 7-story sections; it also correlates fairly well with the brick Soviet towers. The height of the towers is one third of the infill construction of recent years, which also brings the contrast to a certain average norm. The top parts of the towers are “cut away” by a glass floor; they sport the “above-clouds” white color – a psychological technique meant to make the urban giant look smaller. Underneath all the new buildings, there is a tier of an underground parking garage.

Stages

Part of the contest specifications was the requirement for calculating the period of implementation and the logic of repopulation. Seven repopulation waves are anticipated. The first wave uses the already-built “starting” houses and it will “wash away” the old housing stock in the center of the two halves of the district. The second wave is the five-story houses next to the “Zvezdny” movie theater, the ones next to Clinic 31, and so on. The residents are relocated to the nearest houses in such a way that they do not even have to change the right side of the avenue to the left side and vice versa. We will note here that the housing to be sold is chiefly situated in the separately standing towers distributed all over the area, some closer to the metro station, some farther away from it, but still, in a pretty smooth fashion. Possibly, such division of volumes into migratory and commercial type must simply the task selling the housing stock; according to the plan, the commercial housing towers will be the last to be built.

Therapy as a Principle

The Soviet town planning tradition was notable for its “surgical” approach to designing the urban environment; it was not for nothing that some of its results were aptly called “a set of false teeth”: explosions, incisions, and intrusions. Then, in the 1980’s, this approach was finally discarded, and (theoretically) the interest to context prevailed – the desire to research, respond, reflect, and fit in with the surroundings. This approach is most common in a historic city but here it is applied to a modernist heritage, which feels slightly paradoxical: the footprints of those “standardized” houses that once marched these fields are not immortalized by the tactful architects. Figuratively speaking, instead of a “second surgery”, the architects are proposing the “first therapy” of the space, built only some 55 years ago and now falling into some sort of decay. It is easy to notice that the architecture that arises in this project is essentially a cross between five-story houses and... twenty-five story houses not only in terms of planning but also in terms of their height and volume. It probably claims the part of the perfect connecting tissue because it possesses a number of features of “this” and “that” side, which accounts for its immanent winsome look, not seen at a first glance.

Just as tactfully as they did with the trees and the planning structure of the area, the architects are treating its economic realities and functions, trying not to overburden the project with anything supernatural, expensive, all-to-complex, or even potentially unpopular.

“Everything that we did together with the architects Dmitry Aleksandrov and Aleksey Bavykin as part of the expert group is based on the economic and technical calculations – shares Aleksey Ginsburg – No castles in the air, nothing fancy, just solving specific tasks: to create a public space, to keep intact the trees and the scale of construction, and to connect the two parts of the area through the Vernadskogo Avenue. Our proposal takes into account the opinion of many people living in this area. We talked to these people even before the public hearings were organized. The very fact that these people came to the public hearings and said: “Yes, you built it exactly the way we wanted” is for us a great reward in itself”.

13 March 2018

Headlines now

The Silver Skates

The STONE Kaluzhskaya office quarter is accompanied by two residential towers, making the complex – for it is indeed a single ensemble – well balanced in functional terms. The architects at Kleinewelt gave the residential buildings a silvery finish to match the office blocks. How they are similar, how they differ, and what “Silver Skates” has to do with it – we explore in this article.

Overview

On the Dynastic Trail

The houses and townhouses of the “Tsarskaya Tropа” (“Czar’s Trail”) complex are being built in the village of Gaspra in Crimea – to the west and east of the palaces of the former grand-ducal residence “Ai-Todor”. One of the main challenges for the architects at KPLN, who developed the project, was to respond appropriately to this significant neighboring heritage. How this influenced the massing, the façades, and the way the authors work with the terrain is explored in our article.

Object

A New Path

The main feature of the Yar Park project, designed by Sergey Skuratov for Kazan, is that it is organized along the “spine” of a multifunctional mall with an impressive multi-height atrium space in its middle. The entire site, both on the city side and the Kazanka River embankment, is open to the public. The complex is intended not to become “yet another fenced enclave” but, as urban planners say, a “polycenter” – a new point of attraction for the whole of Kazan, especially its northern part, made up of residential districts that until now have lacked such a vibrant public space. It represents a new urban planning approach to a high-density mixed-use development situated in the city center – in a sense, an “anti-quarter”. Even Moscow, one might say, doesn’t yet have anything quite like it. Well, lucky Kazan!

Object

Beneath the Azure Sky

A depository designed by Studio 44 will soon be built in Kenozersky National Park to preserve and display the so-called “heavens” – ceiling structures characteristic of wooden churches in the Russian North, painted with biblical scenes. For each of these “heavens”, the architects created a volume corresponding in scale and dimensions to the original church interior. The result is a honeycomb-like composition, with modules derived directly from the historic monuments themselves, allowing visitors to view the icons from the historically accurate angle – from below, looking upward. How exactly this works is the subject of our story.

Object

The Power of Lines

The building at the very beginning of New Arbat is the result of long deliberations over how to replace the former House of Communication. Contemporary, dynamic, and even somewhat zoomorphic in character, it is structured around a large diagonal grid. The building has become a striking accent both in the perspective of the former Kalinin Avenue and in the panorama of Arbat Square. Yet, unfortunately, the original concept was not fully realized. In 2020, the Moscow ArchCouncil approved a design featuring an exoskeleton – an external load-bearing structure, which eventually turned into a purely decorative element. Still, the power of the supergraphic “holds” the building, giving it the qualities of a new urban landmark with iconic potential. How this concept took shape, what unexpected associations might underlie the grid’s form, and why the exoskeleton was never built – all this is explored in our article.

News

Resort on the Kama River

Wowhaus has developed a project for the reconstruction of Korabelnaya Roshcha (“Mast Grove”), a wellness resort located on the banks of the Kama River.

Object

Nests in Primorye

The eco-park project “Nests”, designed by Aleksey Polishchuk and the company Power Technologies, received first prize at the Eco-Coast 2025 festival, organized by the Union of Architects of Russia. For a glamping site in Filinskaya Bay, the authors proposed bird-shaped houses, treehouses, and a nest-shaped observation platform, topping it all with an entrance pavilion executed in the shape of an owl.

Object

The Angle of String Tension

The House of Music, designed by Vladimir Plotkin and the architects of TPO Reserve, resembles a harp, and when seen from above, even a bass clef. But if only it were that simple! The architecture of the complex fuses two distinct expressive languages: the lattice-like, transparent, permeable vocabulary of “classical” modernism and the sculptural, ribbon-like volumes so beloved by today’s neo-modernism. How it all works – where the catharsis lies, which compositional axes underpin the design, where the project resembles Zaryadye Concert Hall and where it does not – read in the article below.

Object

How Historic Tobolsk Becomes a Portal to the Future

Over the past decade, the architectural company Wowhaus has developed urban strategies for several Russian cities – Vyksa, Tula, and Nizhnekamsk, to name but a few. Against this backdrop, the Tobolsk master plan stands out both for its scale – the territory under transformation covers more than 220 square kilometers – and for its complexity.

Object

St. Petersburg vs Rome

The center of St. Petersburg is, as we know, sacred – but few people can say with certainty where this “sacred place” actually begins and ends. It’s not about the formal boundaries, “from the Obvodny Canal to the Bolshaya Nevka”, but about the vibe that feels true to the city center. With the Nevskaya Ratusha complex – built to a design that won an international competition – Evgeny Gerasimov and Sergei Tchoban created an “image of the center” within its territory. And not so much the image of St. Petersburg itself, as that of a global metropolis. This is something new, something that hasn’t appeared in the city for a long time. In this article, we study the atmosphere, recall precedents, and even reflect on who and when first called St. Petersburg the “new Rome”. Clearly, the idea is alive for a reason.

Object

On the Wave

The project of transforming the river port and embankment in the city of Cheboksary, developed by the ATRIUM Architects, involves one of the city’s key areas. The Volga embankment is to be turned into a riverside boulevard – a multifunctional, comfortable, and expressive space for work and leisure activities. The authors propose creating a new link with the city’s main Krasnaya (“Red”) Square, as well as erecting several residential towers inspired by the shape of the traditional national women’s headdress – these towers are likely to become striking accents on the Volga panorama.

Interview

Valery Kanyashin: “We Were Given a Free Hand”

The Headliner residential complex, the main part of which was recently completed just across from Moscow City, is a kind of neighbor to the MIBC that doesn’t “play along” with it. On the contrary, the new complex is entirely built on contrast: like a city of differently scaled buildings that seems to have emerged naturally over the past 20 years – which is a hugely popular trend nowadays! And yet here – perhaps only here – such a project has been realized to its full potential. Yes, high-rises dominate, but all these slender, delicate profiles, all these exciting perspectives! And most importantly – how everything is mixed and composed together... We spoke with the project’s leader Valery Kanyashin.

Object

The Keystone

Until quite recently, premium residential and office complexes in Moscow were seen as the exclusive privilege of the city center. Today the situation is changing: high-quality architecture is moving beyond the confines of the Third Ring Road and appearing on the outskirts. The STONE Kaluzhskaya business center is one such example. Projects like this help decentralize the megalopolis, making life and work prestigious in any part of the city.

send.project

Perpetuum Mobile

The interior of the headquarters of Natsproektstroy, created by the IND studio team, vividly and effectively reflects the client’s field of activity – it is one of Russia’s largest infrastructure companies, responsible for logistics and transport communications of every kind you can possibly think of.

Object

Water and Light

Church art is full of symbolism, and part of it is truly canonical, while another part is shaped by tradition and is perceived by some as obligatory. Because of this kind of “false conservatism”, contemporary church architecture develops slowly compared to other genres, and rarely looks contemporary. Nevertheless, there are enthusiasts in this field out there: the cemetery church of Archangel Michael in Apatity, designed by Dmitry Ostroumov and Prokhram bureau, combines tradition and experiment. This is not an experiment for its own sake, however – rather, the considered work of a contemporary architect with the symbolism of space, volume, and, above all, light.

Object

Champions’ Cup

At first glance, the Bell skyscraper on 1st Yamskogo Polya Street, 12, appears strict and laconic – though by no means modest. Its economical stereometry is built on a form close to an oval, one of UNK architects’ favorite themes. The streamlined surface of the main volume, clad in metal louvers, is sliced twice with glass incisions that graphically reveal the essence of the original shape: both its simplicity and its complexity. At the same time, dozens of highly complex engineering puzzles have been solved here.

send.project

Semi-Digital Environment

In the town of Innopolis, a satellite of Kazan, the first 4-star hotel designed by MAD Architects has opened. The interiors of the hotel combine elegance with irony, and technology with comfort, evoking the atmosphere of a computer game or maybe a sci-fi movie about the near future.

Object

History never ends

The old railway station in Kapan, a city in southern Armenia, has been given new life by the Paris-based design firm Normal Studio. Today, it serves as a TUMO center.

Object

A Deep, Crystal Shine

A new luxury residential development by ADM architects is set to rise in the Patriarch’s Ponds district, not far from Novopushkinsky Square. It will replace three buildings erected in the early 1990s. The project authors, Andrey Romanov and Ekaterina Kuznetsova, have placed their bets on the variety among the three volumes, modern design solutions, and attention to detail: one of the buildings will feature smoothly curved balconies with a ceramic sheen on their undersides, while another will be accented by glass “sculpture” columns.

Interview

Grigory Revzin: “What we should do with the architecture of the seventies”

Soviet modernism came in two flavors: the good, author-driven kind, and the bad, standardized kind. The good kind was “on the periphery”, while the bad kind was in the center – geographically, in terms of attention, scale, and everything else. Can we demolish it? “That would be destroying public consensus out of thin air”. So what should we do? Preserve it, but creatively: “Bring architecture into places where it hasn’t yet appeared”. Treat these buildings not as monuments, but as urban landscape. Read our interview with Grigory Revzin on the pressing topic of saving modernism – where he proposes a controversial, yet really intriguing, way of preserving 1970s buildings.

Overview

A Roadside Picnic of Urban Planning Theorists

Marina Egorova, head of Empate Architectural Bureau, brought together urban planning theorists – the successors of Alexey Gutnov and Vyacheslav Glazychev – to revive the substance and depth of professional discourse. At the first meeting, much ground was covered: the participants revisited the theoretical foundations, aligned their values, examined a cutting-edge case of the Kazan agglomeration, and concluded with the unfathomable intricacies of Russian land demarcation. Below, we present key takeaways from all the presentations.

Object

Perspective View

CNTR Architects has designed a business center for a new district in Yekaterinburg, aiming to reduce the need for commuting and make the residential environment more diverse. The architectural solutions are equally focused on creating spatial flexibility, comfortable working conditions, and a memorable image that could allow the building to become a spatial landmark of the district.

Object

Malevich and Bathhouses, Nature and High-Tech

The Malevich Bathhouse complex is scheduled to open in the fall of 2025 on the Rublyovo-Uspenskoye Highway. The project, designed by DBA-GROUP under the leadership of Vladislav Andreev, is an example of an unconventional approach to the image of a spa in general and of a bathhouse in particular. Deliberately avoiding any kind of allusion, the architects opted for streamlined forms with characteristic rounded corners, a combination of wood with bent glass, and restrained contemporary shapes – both inside and out. Let’s take a closer look at the project.

Object

Rather, a Tablecloth and a Glass!

After many years, the long-abandoned Horse Guards Department building in St. Petersburg has finally received the attention it deserves: according to a design by Studio 44, the first restoration and adaptation works are scheduled to begin this year. Both the intended function and the general scope of works imply minimal alteration to the complex, which has preserved traces of its three-century history. All solutions are reversible and aimed, above all, at opening the monument to the city and immersing it in a lively social scene – hence the choice of a cultural center scenario with a strong gastronomic component.

Object

Materialization of Airflows

The Nikolai Kamov International Airport in Tomsk opened at the end of August last year. We have already written about the project – now we are taking a look at the completed building. Its functionality is reinforced by symbolic undertones: the architects at ASADOV sought to reflect local identity in the architecture as fully as possible.

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The City as a Narrative

Sergey Skuratov’s approach to large urban plots could best be described as a “total design code”. The architect pays equal attention to the overall composition and the smallest of details, striving to ensure that every aspect is thoroughly thought out and subordinated to the original vision. It’s a Renaissance-like approach, really – a titanic effort demanding remarkable willpower and perseverance. The results are likewise grand – architecture that makes a statement. This article looks at the revived concept for the central section of the Seventh Heaven residential district in Kazan, a composition so thoroughly considered that even the “gradient of visual emphasis” (sic!) across the facades has been carefully worked out. It also touches on the narrative idea behind the project – and even the architect’s own doubts about it.

A Garden of Hope for Freedom

In October, at the Spaso-Evfimiev Monastery in Suzdal, the Prison Yard Garden opened on the site that had served as a prison from the 18th century until the Khrushchev Thaw. The architectural concept was developed by NOῨD Short Film, and the landscape design by the MOX landscape bureau. In fact, there are two gardens here – very different ones. We try to understand whether they evoke the right emotions in visitors, while also showing the beauty of June’s ruderal plants in bloom.

Object

A Laconic Image of Time

The Time Square residential complex, built on the northern edge of St. Petersburg, appears more concise and efficient than its neighbor and predecessor, the New Time complex. Nevertheless, the architect’s hand is clearly felt: themes of “black and white”, “inside and outside”, and most notably, the “lamellar” quality of the facades that seems to visibly “eat away” at the buildings’ mass – everything is played out like a well-written score. One is reminded of both classical modernism and the so-called “post-constructivism”.

Object

The Flower of the Lake

The prototype for the building of the Kamal Theater in Kazan is an ice flower: a rare and fragile natural phenomenon of Lake Kaban “froze” in the large, soaring outlines of the glass screens enclosing the main volume, shaping its silhouette and shielding the stained-glass windows from the sun. The project, led by the Wowhaus consortium and including global architecture “star” Kengo Kuma, won the 2021/2022 competition and was realized close to the original concept in a short – very short – period of time. The theater opened in early 2025. It was Kengo Kuma who proposed the image of an ice flower and the contraposition of cold on the outside and warmth on the inside. Between 2022 and 2024, Wowhaus did everything possible to bring this vision to life, practically living on-site. Now we are taking a closer look at this landmark building and its captivating story.

Object

Peaceful Integration on Mira Avenue

The MIRA residential complex (the word mir means “peace” in Russian), perched above the steep banks of the Yauza River and Mira Avenue, lives up to its name not only technically, but also visually and conceptually. Sleek, high-rise, and glass-clad, it responds both to Zholtovsky’s classicism and to the modernism of the nearby “House on Stilts”. Drawing on features from its neighbors, it reconciles them within a shared architectural language rooted in contemporary façade design. Let’s take a closer look at how this is done.

​Architectural Therapy

In this issue, we are publishing the contest project of renovating city blocks 32, 33, 34, and 35 on the Vernadskogo Avenue by a consortium of OAO “Mosproject” and OOO “Ginsburg Architects”.

Architectural Therapy