On the Hills

The Nizhny Novgorod IT campus, named after mathematician Yuri Neimark, is the mega project among the series of Russian IT campuses, meant to develop the branch on an international level. A total of eight campuses are planned in different cities across the country. The Nizhny Novgorod campus is currently the most famous one: there are reasons to believe that it will be built first – the work started in April 2023 and is expected to be completed in 2025. The campus is designed for 7000 students, the total area of the new buildings is 216.4 thousand m2.

In 2021, Nizhny Novgorod won the competition and became one of the eight cities where IT campuses are planned to be built, with a sketchy pre-concept by Eric Valeev. The sites and tasks were defined in it, but only roughly. The concept became part of the technical brief that was later on offered to the architects of Nikita Yavein’s Studio 44; they’ve been designing the campus – as they almost always do, at a brisk pace – since 2022. This comes as no surprise: Studio 44 has extensive experience working with large training complexes, including IT. First of all, the project of the ITMO High Park campus comes to mind – flashy-looking on the outside and designed as a complex space of a “city for studying” on the inside. There are indeed similarities between the two projects – they relate to the task, typology, and even the fact that the architects worked on the terms of reference together with the client – says Anton Yar-Skryabin, head of the company’s division that designed both campuses.

Anton Yar-Scriabin, Company:

Yes, the ITMO High Park was the first time we were able to work on a project in close cooperation with the client – and we were lucky to have mutual understanding, or I would even say synergy. We used the same principles of interaction and experience in Nizhny Novgorod, and also quite successfully. An important principle is simultaneous separation of functions and merging of complexes. This is especially true for the educational space, where it is necessary for everyone to communicate with everyone else, so that the learning process is as integral as possible: sometimes you can “catch” a teacher on the way to class and ask them a question, somewhere you can organize a quick meeting to discuss joint work; and at the same time there is a possibility to find a quiet place for secluded work for any student or group. Maximum scenarios for work and interaction – this is the essence of our approach; colleagues from the IT sphere really appreciate it, because it is modern and creates conditions for rapid development and adaptation to constant changes.

However, in Nizhny Novgorod, unlike in the ITMO High Park, the campus is located in an urban context – so here interaction with the city was a very important part of the project for us; in fact, we treated the campus as a city, built it into the city at different levels. The research of our team member Elizaveta Korovina helped us a lot in this part: she studied the structure of the city and formulated its specifics – Nizhny Novgorod stands on hills, and at the top of each hill there are some remarkable buildings. They echo each other; there is a connection between them. We tried to integrate our buildings into this historical structure, found a connection with the Kremlin and with the monasteries, although, of course, we also took into account the immediate context.

Nikita Yavein, Company:

The Nizhny Novgorod campus is located in the city, and in a historical city at that. The first part of the campus is even situated on the site of a 16th century settlement – there were excavations and archaeologists worked here.
Therefore, our associations, in addition to those structural things that are necessary for an IT-campus, are also connected with medieval prototypes and their reinterpretation in the XX century. In some ways, it is a monastery cloister – we were reminded, in particular, of Le Corbusier’s Convent Sainte-Marie de La Tourette: there, too, there is a large slope, about 10 meters high, and a rectangle of a courtyard with residential galleries and thin supports raised above it.