Ivan Kozhin:

Julia Tarabarina. The Heart Lies Within

The second-phase building of the Evgeny Primakov School already won multiple awards while still in the design stage. Now that it’s completed, some unfinished nuances remain – most notably, the exposed ceiling structures, which ideally should have been concealed. However, given the priority placed on the building’s volumetric composition, this does not seem critical. What matters more is the “Wow!” effect created by the space itself.

Alyona Kuznetsova. A City Block Isoline

Another competition project for a residential complex on the banks of the Volga in Nizhny Novgorod has been prepared by Studio 44. A team of architects led by Ivan Kozhin concluded that using a regular block layout in such a location would be inappropriate and developed a “custom design” approach: a chain of parceled multi-section buildings stretching along the entire embankment. Let’s explore the features and advantages of this unconventional method.

Julia Tarabarina. Modernism in Avant-Garde

The contest proposal that Studio 44 made for the Krasnoyarsk Opera and Ballet Theater is bright in all senses, and in many ways even provocative – just like a modern theater performance should be. Being in context with modern culture, it even shocks you in some respects. At first, you are amazed at the red color that is present all around, and then you gradually make sense of the picturesque congregation of volumes that share a multitude of functions. And it’s only later that you realize that this conglomerate conceals a modernist building, most of which the architects save intact.

Julia Tarabarina. ​Watched by the Angels from up Above

Held in the General Staff building of the Hermitage Museum, the anniversary exhibition of “Studio 44” is ambitious and diverse. The exhibition was designed to give a comprehensive showcase of the company’s architecture in a whole number of ways: through video, models, drawings, installations, and finally, through a real-life project, the Enfilade, which the exhibition opens up, intensifies, and makes work the way it was originally intended.

Elena Petukhova. ​In Search of Style

Looking for an answer to the eternal question about what Saint Petersburg style is about, Studio 44 combined contextual allusions, modern paraphrase of the northern neoclassical architecture, and an alternative approach to the city block construction. The result is large-scale and integral.

Alyona Kuznetsova, Julia Tarabarina. ​Theater Town

The second stage of Boris Eifman Dance Academy is constructed around a theater building, its space “spinning” around the architectural scenery of the “little town” of the atrium. The result looks like a Russian Matryoshka doll: a theater within a city, and then a little town within a theater, all of this forming a dance school – a very effective way of organizing the space.