OSAArchitects has designed quite a few various projects all over Russia: from the high-rise complex in Moscow’s Tushino to urban villas in its home city of Ekaterinburg. One of the secrets of being so creatively prolific is the successful management of working with young architects: the company teaches them how to be “universal soldiers” capable of running the project from beginning to end, at the same time having plenty of opportunities for finding their own creative identity.

“Yesterday’s college students”, as they describe themselves, Yegor Obvincev and Vladislav Sarapulov, are sharing about the first project that they did independently for the company, and about the experience of going through all of the project stages, from context analysis to developing a marketing strategy for the new complex, as well as about getting a better knowledge of their own selves.

Under the contractual conditions, the architects cannot disclose the location of the complex; let’s just say for the time being that it is business class apartments. The land site is quite an obliging one, located in the middle of a large city. Next to it, there is a lake, whose waterfront has recently begun to get landscaped. The mirror surface of the water impartially reflects the historical buildings, the Soviet-time construction, and the modern ones too.

The architects wanted to create a nice and quiet place with cozy little yards and a green garden, at the same time endowing it with an identity easily recognizable by its clear-cut silhouette, making it a landmark of the circumferential waterfront, and keeping a feel of an accessible and friendly public place. In the course of work, the architects understood a few important things.

An architect must be an actor and a psychologist. The architect’s first task is to understand his client. And he must do that not so much by asking direct questions, as intuitively, through creating a rapport with the client, replacing his self-evident politeness with genuine interest. And, in order to do that, he must learn how to live through someone else’s experience, very much like an actor who acts in accordance with the Stanislavsky system, which, it must be said, is quite a challenge for yesterday’s college students who are now designing a high-end housing project. However, the architects define this ability as the most important one, even more important than then conventional drawing skills.

Yegor also believes that an architect must be a bit of a psychologist because it is his job to help the client form the bullet points, the imagery, and the character of the project. These bullet points are also affected by the context: the culture, the nature, and the national peculiarities. “We live surrounded by interrelationships between people. Therefore, it is important to make sure that you don’t search for the solution for the sake of solution, don’t come up with a design option for the sake of design option, but find something that looks interesting to yourself; something that reflects our common interests”.