The Khodynka Field is a former airfield, whose surroundings have been developed so intensively over the last 20 years that this area became the veritable symbol of the post-Soviet construction megalomania. Two thirds of the arc-shaped contour of the field, whose plan looks like an orange wedge with a 1.5 km basis and an arc more than two kilometers long, are occupied by the “Grand Park” housing complex: 43 hectares, about 500,000 square meters of useful floor space, 4,700 apartments. It seems to include every option of a large-scale volume one can possibly think of: the sculptural house “Sail”, a few towers, and an amphitheater of city blocks, stepping down towards the field. The outside contour is formed by two “wall” buildings, one of them being a whopping 770 meters long. Both feature an alternating “saw-tooth” skyline, for which the house on the western corner was nicknamed “hair comb” by the locals. Instantly, the walls of some large ancient city come to mind – Istanbul, Smolensk, or Kolomna – or, rather, what survived of them. Meanwhile, this wall was not destroyed ages ago, but, quite the other way around, was built in the early 2000’s in accordance with the project by “Mosproject-4” under the leadership of Andrey Bokov.

In addition, Andrey Bokov in collaboration with Dmitry Bush built two stadiums for the CSKA football club: today’s VEB Arena on the west side, in 2016, and the Ice Sport Palace on the east corner, a decade earlier, in 2006. As for this second arena, Grigory Revzin compared it to a “large propeller with its blades flying out in different directions” – the building indeed looks that way because its contour is composed of two spiral-like ramps, red and blue, with colored semitransparent plastic awnings.

Southeast of the whirl of the Ice Palace, upon the long and narrow land site between the palace and the Aviakonstruktora Sukhogo Street, two years ago the housing complex “Litsa” was completed, designed by Vladimir Plotkin and Reserve Union. As for the project itself and the search for the form in this complex task, we already covered both in 2014. Its key parameters can be compared to about a third of the Grand Park’s: the total area 186,000 square meters, the useful floor space 107,000 square meters, all this cramped into a 1.7-hectare land site, which is about fifteen times smaller than that of the predecessor neighbor.