Plot 16 is part of the thriving Moscow City zone located between the new Expo Center and the Third Ring Road in Moscow. The new district was loosely modeled on precedents such as London’s Canary Wharf and La Défense in Paris; Moscow City will eventually play a vital role in the commercial and social life of the metropolitan region. The elegant towers, gradually tapering away from each other as they stretch skyward, draw inspiration from the Moscow skyline, the climate of the region and their prime site on Krasnopresneskaya Embankment.
Comprised of nearly 500,000 sm of new development—including exclusive residences, premium office space, a three-star hotel, a parking structure for 3,700 cars, and extensive green space—Plot 16 is subdivided into two areas. A new private road bisects the site, creating a unique address for the towers. This new road also creates a central North-South pedestrian promenade through the site with internal access to the residential and office towers, as well as through access from Moscow City to the anticipated Moscow Tower to the North. Elsewhere, landscaped paths and plazas knit together the buildings, shops, restaurants, and other amenities on the site.
A continuous strip of parkland and plazas along the site’s southern edge provide a much-needed amenity for the increasingly high-density zone. The greenway—the only one in Moscow City—offers generous drop-off courts for the residential tower and hotel, as well as pocket groves of indigenous trees and open lawns for public use.
Given the northern latitude of the site, the primary design challenge was finding how to best articulate existing natural light. Like accumulated layers of ice, the glass curtain walls of the building ensemble possess varying degrees of translucency, clarity, and reflectivity.
Each modulated glass façade serves to materialize its building’s specific program. The opaque and transparent glass comprising the hotel curtain wall affords privacy for guests in its 330 rooms. A transparent glass façade lends a crystalline appearance to the office tower with its broad, open floor plates. The translucent and transparent glass of the residential tower’s articulated façades appear to refract sunlight, even on a grey winter day. At the scale of the individual residence, transparent glass grants views across the cityscape, while translucent glass draws light further into the unit and enables natural ventilation on the elevation.
The faceted curtain walls of the two towers containing the residential and office programs were generated using custom analysis programs from SOM’s BlackBox Studio. Views to the surrounding city, including the far-off Kremlin, were optimized using additional scripts.
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