Zaryadye Park in Moscow is an architectural triumph

By T.A. | MOSCOW

IT IS one of the largest architectural projects to be completed in Moscow since the fall of the Soviet Union, and the first major public park to open in the city in 50 years. Zaryadye Park, 13 hectares of green space in the heart of the Russian capital, opened to the public last month after four years of construction. When fully complete, 760 trees and 860,000 perennials will frame a series of curvaceous new buildings, including two restaurants, two exhibition spaces, a new philharmonic hall and a bridge that will jut out over the Moscow river. Overlooked by St Basil’s Cathedral and sitting at the foot of the Kremlin, it is one of the most ambitious landscaping projects of the 21st century.

The park radically transforms a historically problematic area. Zaryadye was abandoned by affluent nobles when Peter the Great moved the capital to St Petersburg in 1712. When fortifications were built along the river in the 18th century during the Great Northern War, the land became clogged with sewage. Following the Fire of Moscow in 1812, it was rebuilt in a grand style but, close to docking points on the river, it became the site of the city’s largest Jewish enclave. After the pogroms of the 1880s, many Russian Jews emigrated, but Zaryadye remained a quarter for cheap housing.

After the 1917 October Revolution, Zaryadye’s days seemed numbered. It was partially torn down by Soviet authorities to allow the construction of ramps to the Bolshoy Moskvoretsky Bridge. Josef Stalin sought to build a skyscraper on the site, much like the “Seven Sisters” erected across the city, intended to house the People’s Commissariat of Heavy Machinery. The privations that followed the second world war ensured that the building was never completed, and authorities demolished the residential buildings on the site.

Nikita Khrushchev had hoped to transform the area with the Rossiya Hotel, built between 1964 and 1967 (the project was completed under Leonid Brezhnev). Encouraging foreign guests, it was intended as a statement of openness, and was still the largest hotel in Europe when it was torn down in 2006 by developers hungry to build luxury apartments. When that proposal became mired in complications, the site was abandoned once more.

Yet in that time, a desire to improve Moscow’s public realm became apparent. Citymakers, then just a company of enterprising urbanists, set up a group to campaign for a park, modelled on the Friends of the High Line (FHL had campaigned authorities in New York to turn an abandoned elevated train track into an urban park, with success). The group lobbied local politicians and promoted the concept of the park to the public.

It chimed with mayor Sergey Sobyanin’s proposals for improvements in the city, and he announced the competition in early 2013 as part of the build-up to his campaign for re-election. It was Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the designers of the High Line, which won the contract to design Zaryadye. “Our previous work on the High Line definitely came into play during the competition, but we still think our design for this project won on its own terms,” says Charles Renfro, the lead architect on the project. They sought to represent the whole of Russia, not through monuments or by aping the formal symmetrical design of Muscovite precedents like Gorky Park, but through landscapes and plants.

The design team, which also included Hargreaves Associates, the landscape architects of Queen Elizabeth Park in London, proposed a “wild urbanism”. The park is divided into four zones representing the specific geography of Russia: wetland, forest, steppe and tundra. In the forest sections, the design team have planted the trees of Russia’s extensive woodlands: white birch, larch and Scots pine. In the wetland sections, there are native meadow grasses such as evergreen fescues and tufted hair grass.

In many ways, it is surprising that such a dramatic and challenging piece of design could be completed in Moscow. The only urban parks that can compare in terms of ambition are located in second-tier cities in America, such as Discovery Green in Houston, Texas, completed in 2011 (Hargreaves Associates served as lead designers). In terms of a park located at the core of a European city, the parks that Zaryadye bears comparison with were completed in the 19th, or even 18th, century.

One of the park’s major successes has been to open up the city. This is particularly true of its views: a stunning prospect of the Kotelnicheskaya Embankment Building—one of Stalin’s skyscrapers—is visible from the walkway over the river. New views of the Kremlin, St Basil’s Cathedral and the wider city can be spied from higher points in the park; designers have been careful to use the foliage as a frame. It has also made Moscow more accessible. Pedestrians can walk to the river from Red Square now that the embankment has been re-landscaped.

Zaryadye has become an area that can be enjoyed by all Muscovites and tourists alike. The park was inundated by 100,000 people on its opening day (curiously, some of those visitors interpreted the potted plants as free gifts). An estimated 50,000 people are visiting every day, necessitating crowd-control measures which authorities insist will come down once the initial excitement is over. In the country’s capital, a small piece of Russian wilderness is taking root.