This housing complex is a part of an innovative development European Waterfront in the largest city of Siberia. As all socialist cities that were built or expanded after the WWII, Novosibirsk offers urban fabric weaved out of monotonous rows of multistore rectangular buildings. Since the 1960s, the so-called “micro-rayon” (a group of housing slabs around a public facility) remains the most basic and the most ubiquitous urban form.
Project Name: The House with the Bridges
Studio Name: Brusnika
Location: Bolshevistskaya Street, Novosibirsk, Russia
Realization: 2018–2021
Total area: 24 231 m2
Project team
Architects: SVESMI
Masterplan: KCAP
Apartment layout, underground level/parking: Brusnika Design
Landscape designers: S&P Landscape Architects
Photographs: Dmitry Chebanenko, Maxim Loskutov
Even today, the housing estates are created within the same logic. With just minor improvements in the apartment layouts and ornamentation of the facades, housing of the twenty-first century reincarnates all major characteristics of the twentieth-century mass-produced architecture. The obsolete urban form defines the everyday routines and to a certain extent the mentality of the inhabitants.
House with the Bridges project announces a radical departure from this type of city making and introduces the logic of an urban block elevated on a plinth with an inner communal courtyard positioned on the parking underneath. What was originally intended as four in dependent buildings the architects merged into the wholesome composition of elements interconnected by the continuous ground floor and terraces-bridges at the top level of the complex. While micro-rayon negated the very concept of a street, House with the Bridges activates the ground floor with public functions and offers much more intricate spatial choreography to the inhabitants and visitors.
The Dutch tradition of urban block is being reinterpreted here to provide views onto the city from the open elevated courtyard. Multistore wings of the block shield the courtyard from the harsh winds, while the grand “portals” let in the sunlight throughout the day. The community of the inhabitants get the opportunity to meet in this central space for formal and informal gatherings, while keeping it open for other citizens.
The project introduces a new democratic and socially-engaging model for an affordable housing block in the country, where the city development still generally follows the guidelines for Soviet-type mass-produced urban agglomerations. Envisaged as a prototype – an economically viable alternative to ubiquitous multi-storey slabs, – House with the Bridges also promotes an alternative lifestyle: customized, yet community oriented.
While offering a visually engaging architectural design, the House with the Bridges also actively formats space around itself and creates the context for vibrant urban life along its perimeter. It re-installs the very idea of a street into the housing district of the city, largely built on socialist principles with no properly planned public space.
It also introduces a more intimate, inner courtyard that allows for informal life of the inhabitants and diversifies options for social interaction, even in the harsh Siberian climate. Grand perspectives that are opening through large-scale “portals” onto the central courtyard and neighbouring buildings relate the assemblage to the city context. Metaphorically speaking, the whole building/urban block functions as an optical device: by framing the right vistas it reveals the multilayered complexity and beauty of the area that otherwise would be hard, if not impossible, to grasp.
With their nuanced rhythms and delicately sculptured details, four facades of the building demonstrate formal diversity within the same city block. The plinth and the terraces-bridges keep the ensemble together; one may see it as a contemporary re-interpretation of a traditional European perimetria housing and, at the same time, – as a successful adaptation of this urban form to the very different urban praxis.