The competition for “Samara Arena Park”, conducted by MAAM in the past 2020, was devoted to the concept of developing the land site not far away from the new arena, built in Samara for the World Soccer Championship 2018, at the northern outskirt of the city, on the way to the Kurumoch Airport. Almost simultaneously with it, another competition was conducted, for landscaping the land around the Arena – it was clear that Samara decided to give a serious thought to actualizing the territories lying along the Moscow Highway. The Arena Park is located south of the stadium, and, if we are to drive from the city center to the airport, it will be lying right of the highway. The site is essentially greenfield – a vacant lot for construction with rather pleasant surroundings: it is flanked by woodland on either side, with dacha estates lying south of it.

First place in the “Arena Park competition was scored by the project submitted by the Danish company Juul | Frost Arkitekter, about which we already shared: it looks like a cross between a picturesque asymmetric medieval town and a “garden” city with liberal greenery, with grass growing even on the rooftops.

The project by Sergey Skuratov, which came second, is also characterized by keen attention to detail in terms of landscaping of public territories, but it is more focused on other tasks. The architects approached working with the concept as an opportunity to experiment with the typology of residential buildings: they abandoned the predominance of a sectional building, generally accepted in Russian construction design over the past 20 years, in favor of a mix of gallery and corridor houses with towers as part of city-block development.