The Primakov Gymnasium is quite an unusual school. It accepts children starting from three years old, the instruction being given in two languages – Russian and English – starting from the student’s first day at school. Currently, the gymnasium consists of a kindergarten for 225 children and a school for 550 students. The educational institution has a solid reputation; the students are admitted on a competitive basis, and, in spite of its fee-paying education, today the gymnasium cannot accept everyone who is interested. The Principal of the gymnasium, Maya Maisuradze, sees the solution to this problem in developing the school in accordance with the model of Sochi’s “Sirius”: it is expected that about 500 children will be coming here for short-term educational programs from different regions of the country. And, in order to accommodate for that, you need appropriate infrastructure, including the dormitories for the students and residences for the teachers, many of whom are native speakers of English.



“Maya invests so much enthusiasm, intellect, and energy into this initiative of hers – Nikita Yavein says – That you can arguably consider her to be not just the mastermind of this project but also the coauthor of our architectural solution”. We must note here that, for Nikita Yavein, it’s yet another unique school, after Boris Eifman Dance Academy, Saint Petersburg Graduate School of Management, and “Sirius”. Focusing on the most advanced trends in today’s educational process – “multiplication of communications” and “mixing of layers” – brought about a solution based on a multifunctional atrium, a technique that is quite frequently used by Studio 44. The complexities of the land site in Moscow area’s Odintsovo became in this particular instance the starting point for a structure that became as complex as elegant in its logic, imbued, in addition with the “new school” ideology.