Construction has started on Muse Residences, a housing project by Arch(e)type, an international architecture practice based in Moscow. Two mid-rise buildings will rise close to Verkhnaya Maslovka street. Handover is set for 2029.
Project Name: The Muse Residences
Studio Name: Arch(e)type
Location: Moscow, Russia
Unit count: 309 units
Total area: 46,941 sq.m
For decades Verkhnaya Maslovka housed Soviet painters, sculptors and graphic artists — an unofficial artists’ quarter where studio and home occupied the same rooms. Arch(e)type left the ornamental route alone. The reference sits in the volumes and in the skin instead: terraced masses, rounded balconies, a facade that behaves like something shaped by hand.
“Muse had to hold on to the memory of this place,” says Arch(e)type founder Daria Belyakova. “The creative identity of Verkhnaya Maslovka is very strong. We approached the architecture as an image — lines, a plastic drawing, a hand moving across paper. Hence the soft waves on the facades, the fluid silhouette, the feeling of a building that was drawn before it was built.”
Long horizontal lines run across both buildings and bind them into one gesture. The lower floors pull back into terraces. Higher up the composition gains vertical momentum. Balcony depths vary, so the contour layers up, and the silhouette changes with your position on the street. Come closer and every floor plate looks slightly shifted against the one beneath it.
The palette moves from heavy at the base to light at the top. Rusticated fibre-concrete panels form a tactile plinth at street level. Metal cladding takes over above, alongside floor-to-ceiling glazing. Bands between the floors carry the horizontal rhythm through. The building holds the ground firmly and lightens as it climbs, a gradation closer to sculpture than to standard residential construction.
The massing does urban work too. The programme breaks into linked volumes that step down toward the existing neighbourhood, avoiding a single tower. They mediate between the low-rise blocks nearby and the scale of new development. Smooth glass towers dominate this part of Moscow, and the articulated surface here answers them on purpose.
