Oleg Shapiro: “We design life as a whole, in all of its diversity”

Strelka and Gorky Park: revisiting the early history

Archi.ru:
First things first: how did Wowhaus come into being?

Oleg Shapiro:
In quite a peculiar way. I was around forty-seven when we organized the company. Usually, at that age, people don’t exactly start new architectural practices.

I hold a PhD in architecture, completed postgraduate studies, and had a fairly academic trajectory. At a certain point, though, I stepped away from architecture of my own free will – quite a long time ago, around the age of thirty. Before that, there was a studio affiliated with the Union of Architects; we worked, for example, on the reconstruction project for the Nikolaev House and were involved with the Preobrazhenskaya Sloboda district. But then I more or less left the profession and spent eighteen years working in design together with Dmitry Likin – stage sets, film work, and similar projects.

zooming — Oleg Shapiro and Dmitry Likin, founders of Wowhaus

Then at some point people started telling us: come on, you really should start an architectural practice already. So we did. I remember us sitting there trying to come up with a name, because we decided it was finally time to register officially – and if not then, probably never. We were thinking about the Bauhaus... and that’s how Wowhaus emerged, with the added “WOW” prefix. Which, incidentally, gives clients a reason, whenever we present a project, to ask: “…so where exactly is the wow?” But never mind that.

At first there was just one architect, then three. The very first thing we did was the reconstruction of the Praktika Theater.

Then came the Pioner Cinema. So from the very beginning these were not residential complexes or office towers, but cultural projects.

Pioneer Cinema, Moscow
Pioneer Cinema, Moscow

I think many people perceive Wowhaus as one of the key companies specializing in urban improvement and the urban environment. How did that specialization take shape?

Those were the Luzhkov years. People treated us like respectable grown-up gentlemen and, for some reason, assumed we had to be expensive. Which, to be fair, was not entirely untrue...

In any case, when we finally decided to establish the practice, we came up with the idea that we would focus on temporary architecture.

If you had asked us back then what exactly that meant, honestly, we probably wouldn’t have answered very confidently. The important thing was that we wanted to distance ourselves from the large-scale official architecture of that period. Under Yuri Luzhkov, there were no particular prospects for us, so we moved in another direction – toward culture, non-capital structures, and the urban environment.

Was Strelka the turning point?

Yes, absolutely. That was precisely the zero point. Strelka Institute was originally conceived as a temporary project for three years: afterward, a hotel was supposed to be built on the site. But as you can see, temporary architecture sometimes survives longer than permanent buildings.

It was there that we first invented many of the things we would continue doing for years afterward. We took garages and turned them into non-garages. We took a ruined building and turned it into a bar. We created an amphitheater, the so-called “inhabited fence”, spaces for artists. But most importantly, we invented not so much forms as scenarios. We imagined what people would do there, how they would inhabit the space. That was what really mattered.

That was also when the conversation about public space emerged. We traveled to Rotterdam to meet Rem Koolhaas – myself, Dima Likin, Alexander Mamut, Ilya Oskolkov-Tsentsiper, and Varvara Melnikova. We understood that we wanted to create some kind of educational institution, but we did not yet understand what exactly it should be.

At the time, Koolhaas himself was interested in doing something in Moscow – not necessarily building something; Russia itself interested him. And it was in Rotterdam that all of this was essentially discussed. He formulated rather quickly what the project could become: he said we would work with public spaces. At that moment, hardly anyone in Moscow was really using those words or fully understood what they meant.

Later, already serving as curator of the Venice Architecture Biennale, he brought us onto the stage and effectively presented the launch of a new educational project in Moscow.

After that, the curriculum for this whole initiative began to take shape: lecturers appeared – Winy Maas, Stefano Boeri, Carlo Ratti, among others. Rem Koolhaas himself was actively involved and also taught at Strelka Institute. Admission was incredibly competitive – around thirty applicants per place – and many people specifically wanted to study with Koolhaas.

Then the whole idea was articulated publicly as well: the magazine Bolshoy Gorod published a major interview with Koolhaas about public spaces, where he essentially explained what they were and why they mattered.

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Olive Beach in Gorky Park, Moscow
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Gorky Park Ice Rink, Moscow
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Pioneer Summer Cinema in Gorky Park, Moscow
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Golitsyn Pond in Gorky Park, Moscow

And then came Gorky Park.

Yes, and at that moment everything fell into place. The mayor changed, and Sergey Kapkov arrived as director of Gorky Park. That was already a major challenge. A huge space in the center of the city. Neglected. But with funding, expectations, and political will behind it. A rare stroke of luck.

I remember walking through the park with Kapkov – he was wearing enormous rubber boots, while I had none and was completely soaked – and he said: the first project will open in June. I thought he was crazy. It was impossible even to walk through the place, let alone open anything there. You couldn’t even see the water, it was impossible to approach the river, there was some kind of private serpentarium in the park, random kiosks everywhere; it was a complete dump.

But in June we really did build the Olive Beach, with showers suspended over the water. Swimming in the river, of course, was forbidden. Incidentally, that became quite an important theme for us: rethinking typologies. Not simply a beach, but a new urban ritual.

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Strelka Institute, Moscow. “Habitable fence”
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Strelka Institute, Moscow. Event courtyard
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Strelka Bar, Moscow

And what is interesting is that this story never really ended for us. Right now, for the third time, we are once again working with Gorky Park. The first time it was almost a social program; the second was the Krymskaya Embankment, which was already architecture proper, though still experimental in spirit. Now everything is being unified: Gorky Park stretches all the way from the Sparrow Hills to the Krymskaya Embankment, becoming one enormous territory encompassing some unimaginable number of hectares.

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Gorky Park – continuous green belt
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New pavilions on Pushkinskaya Embankment, Moscow
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New pavilions on Pushkinskaya Embankment, Moscow
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New pavilions on Pushkinskaya Embankment, Moscow
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Pioneer Pond in Gorky Park, Moscow

And this is no longer a quick intervention, but a carefully phased process – involving utilities, infrastructure, and serious architectural supervision. At the same time, elsewhere in Moscow – not by us, but by other architects – several other major parks are currently underway: Kolomenskoye, Sokolniki Park. The conversation is no longer about isolated beautification projects; it has become a large-scale, systematic engagement with urban territories.

And incidentally, what I call our second phase of work with Gorky Park – the Krymskaya Embankment project – actually grew out of our own initiative. At the time we were based at Red October. Our architects would cycle to Gorky Park for site supervision – though I personally don’t like bicycles – and at some point we realized that between the city and the park there was this strange abandoned territory with enormous potential.

We developed a proposal and simply showed it to Sergey Kapkov, who by then had become Moscow’s Minister of Culture. It didn’t feel like anything particularly large-scale at the time – just an embankment project. He took it to the mayor, and we were told: we’re doing it. By September! We asked: next year? No, this year. And by September it really did open.

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Krymskaya Embankment, Moscow
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Krymskaya Embankment, Moscow
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Krymskaya Embankment, Moscow

Was that when you became labeled as “urban improvement specialists”?

Yes. During the Gorky Park and Krymskaya Embankment projects we suddenly became the city’s main “beautification experts”. Though we ourselves never believed we were engaged in beautification in the conventional sense. Everyone already knew perfectly well what “beautification” meant back then: paving tiles, streetlights, trash bins... all the inevitable elements of a project. What we proposed instead – and it became our great heroic PR gesture – was that we were not dealing with beautification, but with the urban environment.

What interested us was what people actually do: how they move, where they sit, where they meet, how a place lives in general. Roughly what would later come to be called the “user scenario”.

At the same time, you also had other projects underway – the Electrotheatre, the Polytechnic Museum.

Yes, and for us that was extremely important. At exactly the same moment, we began working on the Stanislavsky Electrotheatre and the Polytechnic Museum. The Electrotheatre became one of our major works in the cultural sphere. And that, of course, is no longer “urban improvement”.

But on the other hand, contemporary cultural institutions now operate according to the logic of public space. Whether it is a museum, a theater, or an educational center – they can no longer function as closed boxes that open for two hours in the evening like a traditional theater, or focus solely on collecting, studying, and exhibiting artifacts like a classical museum. They must remain active throughout the day, draw people in, stay open, and sustain a diverse surrounding life.

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Stanislavsky Electrotheatre, Moscow. Main foyer
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Polytechnic Museum, Moscow. Restoration and modernization project
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Polytechnic Museum Park, Moscow
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Polytechnic Museum Park, Moscow
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Stanislavsky Electrotheatre, Moscow. Scene from “Anna in the Tropics” play, directed by Alexander Ogaryov

In this sense, the Galiaskar Kamal Tatar State Academic Theater belongs to the same category. A major cultural institution today must be capable of functioning as an accessible, open public space. And I think this has become a very important direction for us.

Disorder and order: how the company functions

How is your company structured today? Wowhaus looks like a well-tuned machine...

At first there was no machine at all. There was one girl sitting in the office at Red October, and Dima and I barely even went there ourselves. We had no real understanding of how to begin. We had this rather romantic idea: we’ll gather fifteen or twenty very talented young people, educate them, they’ll listen to us, and we’ll come up with ideas together.

That logic probably could have worked if we had stopped in time at a compnya of roughly thirty people. But that never happens. Projects keep arriving one after another, the company grows, and at some point you simply have to grow up as well.

You deliberately recruited very young people, didn’t you?

Yes, and we still do. The first people who joined us came from Strelka Institute. It seemed to us that if someone had even managed to get there, gain admission, and survive the whole experience, then that already represented a certain type of person we would find interesting to work with.

Later we invented the internship program. Because an architect arrives with a portfolio listing all the great projects they supposedly participated in, but it is impossible to understand what exactly they actually did there. Not because they are lying – it’s simply not visible.

So we created a competitive internship program. Internships exist at many major firms – for example at OMA, SANAA, or in the office of Alejandro Aravena. But there, interns usually arrive with their own laptops and mostly assemble models or produce renderings. We approached it differently: out of the three-month internship, one month is devoted to a separate educational project. We assign a topic, and they develop a project under the supervision of two of our lead architects – incidentally, everyone here wants to teach. During the other two months, they work within actual ongoing projects. By the end of that period, we understand very clearly who fits us well, and we can invite them onto the team.

Internship at Wowhaus
Design team of the Galiaskar Kamal Tatar State Academic Theatre, Kazan

When did it become clear that romance was no longer enough?

Roughly after about thirty people. That happened about three years into the practice. It became clear that we needed structure. And here a key role was played by Anna Ishchenko, our director. She joined roughly a year after we decided to set up the company, and in practice she turned our wonderful creative disorganization into something that actually worked.

She is not an architect, thank God – she is a philologist. And a philologist, as it turned out, is almost a mathematician: someone precise, systematic. She also had experience as a publisher at Bolshoy Gorod, which meant she understood how business processes actually function. She would ask terrifying questions like: “Do you even have an accountant?” And we had to answer: “We do now”.

How many people work in your company now?

Around 160. There are nine project groups, project managers, a separate working documentation department, landscape and master planning, lawyers, finance, PR, marketing, HR – everything a large office is supposed to have. At any given time, up to fifty projects can be running simultaneously: some dormant, some active, some at the delivery stage.

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Tobolsk master plan. Urban small rivers
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Tobolsk master plan. Irtysh River embankment
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Tobolsk master plan. Lower Posad development plan

But you don’t want to turn into a Soviet-style institute?

Of course not! I once worked a bit at TsNIIPromzdaniy, and I have a fairly strong memory of what that kind of structure can look like. So we make every effort not to become that kind of classical institute. Although, of course, architecture is an eternal profession: just as there used to be chief designers and chief architects, we still have equivalents of that today.

We simply call things differently. Not a “workshop” or “studio” but a “project group”. And we also have a favorite figure – the architect-expert. This is someone who does not want to move into administrative management but is nonetheless a very strong architect. And we try to build a separate track for them – in terms of respect, responsibility, and compensation – without forcing them to become managers.

And you are comfortable with people leaving you and starting their own practices?

What can you do about it? That’s how the profession develops. We can’t exactly say: let’s die first, and only then you can evolve. In fact, many of the people who grew up inside the company have gone on to start their own practices. For example, there are teams like Megabudka and UTRO. With some of them we remain friends, we meet, and we invite each other to celebrations. I also have a house outside the city, and we once had a tradition there: after my summer birthday, everyone would come over – at first five or ten people, then fifteen. Now it’s close to a hundred, and it has become a whole event that takes quite a while to recover from afterward. But we’ve kept the tradition going.

We also have a very strong educational line – internships, MARSH School of Architecture, diploma students. People inside the company gradually become teachers themselves. And there is literally a queue of people who want to teach.

How rigid is the specialization between your departments?

We proudly call ourselves a multidisciplinary architectural company: from master planning to object design. An architect, in our view, should be able to do everything. It is a rather strange profession. For example, I personally made almost all the furniture in my own house – except upholstered pieces. Everything else I did myself, because nothing satisfied me. And in general, that’s a normal mindset. We approach our projects in a similar way whenever there is such a task – or rather, such an opportunity.

An architect is someone who composes an environment. And an environment consists of very different things.

Neo-industrialization

If we look at Wowhaus today, what is the main new theme for you right now?

Contemporary production is extremely important. Or, if you like, neo-industrialization. It is a relatively recent but very powerful shift in perception.

For a long time we lived with the idea of the post-industrial city: services, education, creative industries, coffee, dental clinics, universities. But at the same time, we all use cars and things that are produced somewhere by someone. And when a new wave of competition for manufacturing began, it became clear that production never disappeared – it was simply temporarily out of sight.

And it suddenly turns out that contemporary production – and I, by the way, originally studied transport and industrial architecture – is made up of gigantic laboratories, highly automated processes, and a very small number of extremely highly qualified specialists. And there is now fierce competition for these people. There is competition for architects, of course, but for these specialists it is even more intense.

As far as I understand, you are now doing a lot of projects for companies like OMK, SIBUR and others. But what exactly are these projects?

Yes, although much of it is under NDA, so we cannot show everything, even though a great deal has been done.

The structure is more or less the following. A company has a “city of presence”. It has an industrial territory. It has the interface between that territory and the city. Entrances, transport systems, administrative and amenity buildings, laboratories, control centers, public spaces, and cultural programs. There is a master plan for the city. There is a master plan for the industrial site itself. There is a waterfront. There are façades of administrative buildings. There is a health center. And in reality, all of this is one single process.

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Nizhnekamsk master plan. Development of recreational areas along the Kama River
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Nizhnekamsk master plan. Infill development
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Nizhnekamsk master plan. Pedestrian and bicycle bridge in Omshanka Park

In Tobolsk, for example, we worked on a master plan where the interests of the city and a large SIBUR industrial site came together. In Vyksa, it is a vast territory with a waterfront and a park created on the site of former production facilities. In Kazan, the interface between the Kazanorgsintez territory and the city is particularly interesting: there are leftover “no-man’s lands”, a tram turnaround loop, laboratories, new activity – and from all this, a new specialized urban sub-center can emerge.

In all Soviet master plans there were two dreams: to make cities polycentric and to relocate industry outside them. Neither of those really worked at the time. And now something different is happening: new urban centers are forming around industrial enterprises inside the city. People come there, conferences take place, cafés appear, public spaces, laboratories, educational programs. And if cultural life emerges, people do not simply leave after work – they stay. That is how a new urban center forms, which is precisely what is needed for a polycentric city to exist.

From here another topic emerges. At one point everyone spoke about “non-core assets”: housing was distributed, everything unnecessary was sold off. Soviet health center were also considered outdated. But some of them were never sold – and stood abandoned. And suddenly it turned out they were needed again. A health center (or a “sanatorium” as they called it in the Soviet Union) was seen as a forgotten Soviet non-core asset that everyone was supposed to get rid of. But the opposite happened: they became relevant again, including as a way of retaining valuable personnel.

Are you designing sanatoriums as well?

At the moment we have four such “sanatoriums” in our portfolio. One of them is under construction in Nizhnekamsk for SIBUR. Initially, the client wanted a reconstruction, but it quickly became clear that the existing building could not be adapted to meet modern requirements. So it was demolished and is now being rebuilt from scratch.

A contemporary “sanatorium” (OK, let’s stick to this term) is no longer just a place where people come for medical procedures and rest. It includes family recreation, children’s programs, sports, leisure activities, a medical block, short wellness stays, and daily scenarios for people who live nearby. It is essentially a large socio-medical program.

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Korabelnaya Roshcha Sanatorium, Nizhnekamsk. Swimming pool
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Redevelopment of a corporate sanatorium. Beach pavilion
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Korabelnaya Roshcha Sanatorium, Nizhnekamsk
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Redevelopment of a corporate sanatorium. Visitor Center

And you know what struck me most? There are no luxury suites for senior management in these sanatoriums. None at all. There are no special enclaves for top executives. Everyone lives more or less the same. It is an unexpectedly strong and, I would say, deeply human approach.

New geography

You now have a branch in Kazan. Is that also a result of the shift toward industrial projects?

After the Galiaskar Kamal Tatar State Academic Theater and the accumulation of projects there in general, it became clear that without a local presence it was becoming difficult to work effectively. So now we have a team in Kazan, led by Ilyas – he used to work with us, then left, then returned, and now heads the branch.

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Galiaskar Kamal Tatar State Academic Theatre, Kazan
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Galiaskar Kamal Tatar State Academic Theatre, Kazan
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Galiaskar Kamal Tatar State Academic Theatre, Kazan
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Galiaskar Kamal Tatar State Academic Theatre, Kazan
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Galiaskar Kamal Tatar State Academic Theatre, Kazan
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Galiaskar Kamal Tatar State Academic Theatre, Kazan

In Kazan, beyond corporate projects, there are also purely urban lines of work. Lake Kaban, for example, is at once a stronghold of Tatar urban culture in the Old Tatar Quarter, an industrial layer from the former village of Pletni with its factories and bathhouses, and a very picturesque natural shoreline with weeping willows. It is an extremely complex context: several transformations are unfolding there simultaneously. The city in these areas is becoming denser, more intricate, more alive.

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New Lower Kaban Lake Embankment, Kazan. Viewing platform with pavilion on Kunche Street
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New Lower Kaban Lake Embankment, Kazan. Viewing platform on Fatykh Karim Street
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New Lower Kaban Lake Embankment, Kazan. Access to the natural shoreline

Kazan, Nizhnekamsk, Almetyevsk – this is already a fairly dense working region for us.

Yet you are also still working with parks in Moscow?

Yes, beyond the Gorky Park, which I mentioned at the beginning, we are currently working actively on Ekaterininsky Park as well. It is one of the oldest estate parks in Moscow, where the manor of Saltykov – a cultural heritage site – still preserves a clearly legible regular layout. In the 1930s, there was also a huge tennis stadium here with dozens of courts. Today it belongs to the Ministry of Social Protection, and it hosts a very dense social program: family recreation, “Moscow Longevity”, and so on. Over time, however, the space has simply fragmented into disjointed pieces and now requires renewal.

There is a pond with a boating station that was long semi-abandoned, an unused restaurant at the entrance, a concert venue, and a place where elderly residents always gathered to dance – we created a proper platform for them. There is also a family center: previously there was a military unit with a greenhouse on that site, and it was not even considered part of the park – the greenhouse was demolished, the concrete fence removed, and the territory simply incorporated into the park.

Ekaterininsky Park. Large pond and boathouse
Ekaterininsky Park, Moscow. Boathouse, 1951

So the work there is not about “making a park” in the abstract sense, but about assembling these fragmented pieces into a functioning system: restoring the boating station, creating proper entrances, rethinking the tennis courts, integrating new functions. It is a long-term process where you are not working with a blank slate, but with an accumulated, partly accidental yet still living urban layer.

But you are not limited to parks?

No, of course not. We also participate in invitation-only competitions, including developer-led ones, for large residential complexes. This is a major part of contemporary practice. We take part quite often: sometimes we win, sometimes we don’t, and sometimes you win but the project still never gets built. It is a separate reality – competitions can last a long time, strong teams are involved, serious work is done, but in the end the project may simply not happen.

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Federal Center for Original and Advanced Biomedical and Pharmaceutical Technologies, Moscow. Competition project
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Federal Center for Original and Advanced Biomedical and Pharmaceutical Technologies, Moscow. Competition project
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Federal Center for Original and Advanced Biomedical and Pharmaceutical Technologies, Moscow. Competition project
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Federal Center for Original and Advanced Biomedical and Pharmaceutical Technologies, Moscow. Competition project
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Public and Cultural Center, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky. Competition-winning concept
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Public and Cultural Center, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky. Competition-winning concept
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Dmitri Hvorostovsky Krasnoyarsk Opera and Ballet Theatre. Competition-winning concept
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Dmitri Hvorostovsky Krasnoyarsk Opera and Ballet Theatre. Competition-winning concept
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Dmitri Hvorostovsky Krasnoyarsk Opera and Ballet Theatre. Competition-winning concept

There are also competitions for large master plans. Unfortunately, not all projects can be shown.

And then there is another topic. After changes in legislation, individual housing construction (IHS) has become a separate field: settlements, new types of habitation, infrastructure. These are enormous territories – 200, 400 hectares.

If you put all of this together, what is Wowhaus today, in your view?

The key thing is that we are still working with environment. It’s just that “environment” has become much broader than it was when we were first labeled as urban designers focused on public space improvement. It now includes parks, theatres, museums, master plans, administrative and amenity buildings, sanatoriums, interiors, waterfronts, and industrial territories.

But essentially, what still interests us is the same question: what exactly will happen in this place, how people will live there, why they will want to come – and why they will not want to leave immediately. In a sense, we are continuing the same line of work, only expanding it. We try to design life as a whole, in all its diversity: from urban environments to housing, from master plans to very specific interiors.

The scale of tasks has changed significantly, but the logic remains the same. And it must be said – it is a very engaging pursuit.

26 May 2026

Interviewed by:
Julia Tarabarina
Translated by:
Anton Mizonov

Headlines now

Interview

Oleg Shapiro: “We design life as a whole, in all of its diversity”

Wowhaus has long since outgrown its association with “urban improvement” projects alone. One of its newer directions is neo-industrialization. Another is large-scale master planning. Yet work on Gorky Park is once again underway – only now on a more systematic and far-reaching level. In this interview, we simultaneously revisit Rem Koolhaas, Strelka, and the history of attention to the “urban environment”, while also exploring what exactly Wowhaus is working on today and how the company operates – with its nine divisions and approximately 160 employees.

News

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Mound of Memory

The competition proposal for a memorial complex on the Pulkovo Heights by Studio 44 will not be realized, yet it deserves attention as an intriguing example of how architecture can symbolize traumatic events and thereby contribute to their processing and integration into human experience. The architects also succeed in combining memorial and recreational functions without slipping either into excessive dramatization or oversimplification. The project develops ideas explored in two earlier competition entries that likewise remained unbuilt – the Museum of the Siege of Leningrad and the Tuchkov Buyan park. It also recalls the mound-like hill that Alexander Nikolsky embodied in the form of the now-lost stadium on Krestovsky Island.

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Home Base

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Doubles Match

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Object

Microdynamics of Macroprocesses

Given the proximity of the multifunctional complex SOLOS to Sokolniki Park and to a major transport hub, Kleinewelt Architekten embedded in the design of the two high-rise towers a sense of dynamism more characteristic of natural phenomena than of man-made objects. Without the authors’ diagrams, this logic is not easy to decipher, although the eye immediately detects a pattern and tries to grasp it. It seems to us that one tower contains the impulse of a bud about to open, while the other evokes the movement of a lithospheric plate. Let us try to unravel it together.

Report

The Space of Post-Cubism

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The Value of Open Space

For the site near the Barrikadnaya Metro Station, Sergey Skuratov developed five projects between 2020 and 2025. Two of them were ones that won the client’s invitation-only competitions. The fifth was recently selected by the Mayor of Moscow for implementation. The project is vivid and sculptural, expressive, eye-catching, and engaging – very much in line with the spirit of our time. And yet, this project is mid-rise rather than tall. In its northwestern part, near the metro and Druzhinnikovskaya Street, it shapes a comfortable urban environment. On the opposite side, it opens up, allowing sunlight into the courtyard and creating a spatial pause within the dense city fabric. How it is organized, what geometric principles underlie it, and why it takes this form – all this is explored in our article.

Coming From the Cold

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Object

Symphony of Water and Brick

The Alter residential complex, designed by Stepan Liphart and built on a bend of the Okhta River, is an example of a “drawn house”: the number of original architectural details is virtually immeasurable. As a result, ribs, projections, and recesses create a picturesque silhouette even without a significant variation in height. Both composition and material respond to the proximity of the river and to the red-brick factory building dating back to the early 20th century. The project was also significantly shaped by recommendations from the city’s chief architect. More details in our article.

Object

The Penguin House

The building with a curved façade on Brestskaya Street is one of the manifestos of Russian neomodernism of the early 2000s, a sculpture – this is how Anatoly Belov interprets it, speaking of “breaking from the modernist canon and the contextual approach”. We do not fully agree with the author, but his perspective is an interesting one.

Object

Wave and Vertical

The premium residential complex designed by GAFA for a site in the Khoroshevsky District responds to multiple constraints – the arc of a planned roadway, the water protection zone of the Khodynka River, and insolation requirements – through inventive massing. The composition is built on the interplay of two spatial layers: an elongated perimeter block and three towers concealed behind it generate the silhouette and key viewpoints, while also adding semantic depth reinforced by the façade solutions. Another defining feature is a large private courtyard, complemented by a citywide linear park.

Object

Office on Trubnaya

We continue publishing projects by Valery Kanyashin. A building once described, a quarter century ago, as an example of “quiet modernism” has remained just that in some people’s memory. According to Anatoly Belov, its main quality is its unobtrusiveness. The architects from Ostozhenka say the leading role here is played by context and landscape – the change in elevation. Yet is it really so inconspicuous?

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The First International

With this publication, we begin a series of texts dedicated to works by the late Valery Kanyashin, one of the founders of Ostozhenka Architects. As it happens, the projects he was involved in largely illustrate our understanding of the firm and its history. The first project in this series is the International Moscow Bank on Prechistenskaya Embankment.

in memoriam

In Memory of Valery Kanyashin

On Friday, February 27, architect Valery Kanyashin passed away – co-founder of Ostozhenka Architects and the author of many significant buildings in Moscow. We publish a text by Anatoly Belov in memory of Valery Kanyashin.

Report

Hypertext in Space

As part of the exhibition “What We Have We (Do Not) Keep”, Sergey Tchoban, the Museum of Architecture, and the CHART studio experiment with an eco-conscious approach to exhibition design, with thematic cross-references and even with publicistic reflections on the necessity of preserving modernism, the roots of contemporary architecture, and the birth of ideas. All of this makes the exhibition, with its light and transparent design, look quite innovative. The elements – both “material” and conceptual – are familiar, yet their combination is far from conventional.

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The Outline of “Foundation”

In their competition proposal for the Fili transport hub, the consortium led by Alexey Ilyin proposed an “inhabited arch” – a form that is simple yet complex. The architects emphasize that even at the competition stage, the project’s feasibility was fully calculated, taking into account the minimal nighttime closures of Bagration Avenue. How was this achieved? With what functions? Let us take a closer look. In our view, the building would have suited the heroes of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation novels perfectly.

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The Flying Horizontal

“A house in the spirit of Wright”, as architect Roman Leonidov describes it, pointing to his source of inspiration, was built on a challenging wedge-shaped site. To achieve a sense of intimacy and secure good views from the windows, the entire volume had to be shifted toward the far boundary, turning the house “back” to the neighboring mansions. The main façade demonstrates time-tested techniques often employed by the company: articulated horizontals, a weightless roofline, and a triad of materials – light plaster, dark slate, and warm wood.

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Needles of Horizon Contemplation

The “House of Horizons”, designed by Kleinewelt Architekten in Krylatskoye, is carefully thought out at the stereometric level – from the logic of how the volumes interlock (and, conversely, how gaps are articulated between them) to the triangular balconies that give the building its striking, slightly bristling silhouette.

News

The Red Thread

A linear park project prepared by Alexey Ilyin studio for the improvement of a riverbank in one of the residential districts seeks to reconnect people with nature. Two levels of the embankment invite visitors to contemplate the landscape while at the same time protecting the riverbank from excessive human impact. The “aerial street” links functional zones and the opposite banks, creating new points of attraction along the way: balconies, bridges, and even a “grotto”.

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Spindle and Thread

The concept of the Waver residential complex in Yekaterinburg draws inspiration from the past of the Parkovy district. In order to preserve the memory of the late-19th-century flax spinning mill once located here, the architectural company KPLN turns to the theme of textiles and weaving. The project’s main expressive device is a system of ribbons made of perforated weathering steel – a material that, in such volumes, has arguably not yet been used in Russian residential projects.

Overview

From Ski Resorts to Year-Round Recreation Clusters

In mid-December, several architectural firms gathered to discuss a “seasonal” topic: the prospects for the development of domestic ski tourism. Where is modern infrastructure already in place, where do only remnants of the Soviet legacy remain, and where is there still nothing – but projects are underway and soon to be completed? This article explores these questions.

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Woven Into Sokolniki

Over the past few years, high-rise residential construction in former industrial zones has become the main theme of Moscow architecture. Towers are springing up here and there – but the question is what kind of towers they are. The residential complex CODE Sokolniki, designed by Ostozhenka Architects, is a project where every detail has been taken care of. The authors are attentive to the history of the site, the continuity of the urban fabric, the skyline, and visual corridors. They also proposed a motif with the lyrical name “scarf”. We take a closer look at the volumetric composition and the large-scale décor “woven”, in this case, out of terraces and balconies.

Interview

Stepan Liphart and Yuri Gerth: “Our Program Is Aesthetic”

The studio of Stepan Liphart, an architect known for his distinctive signature style and one-off projects, now has a partner. Yuri Khitrov, a specialist with a broad range of competencies, will take on the part of the work that distracts one from creativity but drives the business forward. One of the aims of this partnership is to improve the urban environment through dialogue with clients and officials. We spoke with both sides about their ambitions, the firm’s development strategy, shared values, and the need for pragmatism. And why the studio is called “Liphart & Gerth” only became clear at the very end of the interview.

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The Copper Mirror

The varied-toned sheen of “unsealed” copper, painterly streaks and fingerprints, exposed concrete, and the unusual proportions – when you study the ZILART Museum building by Sergei Tchoban and SPEECH architects, there is plenty to talk about. However, it seems to us that the most interesting thing is how the museum’s composition responds to the realities of the district itself. The residential district has been realized as an open-air exhibition of façade statements by contemporary architects – but without public access to the inner courtyards of the blocks. This building – that is, the museum – is exactly the opposite: on the outside, it is deliberately restrained, while inside it shines spectacularly, creating its own sunbeams in any weather.

View

“Strangers” in the City

We asked Alexander Skokan for a comment on the results of 2025 – and he sent us a whole article, moreover one devoted to the discussion we recently began on the “appropriateness of high-rises” – or, more broadly speaking, “contrasting insertions into the urban fabric”. The result is a text that is essentially a question: why here? Why like this?

Interview

Dmitry Ostroumov: “To use the language of alchemy, we are involved in the process of “transmutation...

What we ended up having was an extremely unusual conversation with Dmitry Ostroumov. Why? At the very least, because he is not just an architect specializing in the construction of Orthodox churches. And not just – which is an extreme rarity – a proponent of developing contemporary stylistics within this still highly conservative field. Dmitry Ostroumov is a Master of Theology. So in addition to the history and specifics of the company, we speak about the very concept of the temple, about canon and tradition, about the living and the eternal, and even about the Russian Logos.

Interview

MB-PROJECT: “Every new project is a challenge”

In this issue, we speak with Dmitry and Oleg Shurygin, founders of the company MV-PROJECT, which has extensive experience in designing theater and entertainment buildings as well as working with cultural heritage sites.

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A Glazed Figurine

In searching for an image for a residential building near the Novodevichy Convent, GAFA architects turned to their own perception of the place: it evoked associations with antiquity, plein-air painting, and vintage artifacts. The two towers will be entirely clad in volumetric glazed ceramic – at present, there are no other buildings like this in Russia. The complex will also stand out thanks to its metabolic bay-window cells, streamlined surfaces, a ceremonial “hotel-style” driveway, and a lobby overlooking a lush garden.