The grand-scale housing complex with a romantic name of Zurbagan will be built at the edge of Voronezh, on the left bank of the namesake river, which floods here into a manmade lake. The historical center of the city is situated on the opposite bank of the river; the left bank is industrial and is dominated by prefabricated houses, but the developed land site is situated to the north of the nucleus consisting of old industrial parks. There is a sand bar stretching to the north of it, where a children’s yacht club will be built; behind the sand bar, again, to the north, over the gulf, the “Lazurny” housing complex is being built, a rather dull prefab affair. The actual territory of Zurbagan occupies around 20 hectares and is arranged along the arc of the gulf about a kilometer long. Along the water age, about 150-200 meters from the bank, runs the Dobrolubova Street, now consisting of small private houses. As for the sand bank, it is rather unkempt, overgrown with trees and overridden with ruts from the anglers’ SUVs. This area has two names, Koldunovka or Otrozhka, after the township that has been known since the XVII century.

The silhouette of the complex, designed by KPLN architects, unlike the “micro-district” that is being built nearby, is anything but “standard”. It puts one in the mind of New York, or Chicago, or, most likely, Dubai, yet not in a straightforward way – rather, it explores the very idea of a textbook example of towers by the water. It barely marks the recognizable archetypes without putting too much focus on them: here is an Art Deco Chicago couple, here is a modernist slab with dark spots that makes one think about Rotterdam; here is a string of sections of different height and colors, treated as towers that got “stuck” together, and here are towers that are sharpened as giant pencils, and here are again three “Wright” parallelepiped skyscrapers, yet black and slender, and here is a “mirror” couple of two triangular “sail” buildings.