Perimeter Infill
Type: Multi-Residential, Urban Strategy
Location: Moscow, Russia
Client: DOM/Strelka Housing Competition
Status: Competition Entry
This proposal considers a specific existing housing estate in Moscow as a test site for redeveloping Soviet Era housing estates across Russia. The Soviet era housing program that followed WWII was one of the biggest construction projects of the 20th Century. The state built an estimated 200 million square-meters of housing between the 1933 and 1970. The five storey housing blocks, nicknamed ‘Khrushchyovka’, were the predominant housing typology of the program. Much of this housing is now threatened with demolition due to urbanising population pressures on the increasingly privatized land where they are located.
Rather than a highly disruptive clean slate re-development, ‘Perimeter Infill’ proposes a strategy to increase housing supply yet whilst retaining the existing building fabric. A series of 'additive' typologies that offer new spatial qualities and ways of habitation transform the existing building stock to increase amenity and living possibilities for existing and new inhabitants. Through the addition of new volume the goal was to demonstrate a doubling in residential density from GFZ 0.9 to GFZ 1.8.
At an urban scale, the new buildings connect the existing freestanding Khrushchyovka to create an amalgamated whole of old and new. This gesture creates a large courtyard formally defining a new type of urban space and streetscape.
Selected site: Севастопольский пр. & ул. Каховка