Spanish Quarter, Moscow, Russia
Courtyard blocks, ground-floor shops and pedestrian streets in southern Moscow
Moscow's 'Spanskie Quartal', or 'Spanish Quarter', is an innovative residential development in the Kommunarka district, in the south of the city. Designed by EDDEA, it marks a significant step forward in Moscow's urban fabric, combining the best of contemporary design, infrastructure and sustainability to offer residents a new way of life.
It was the first phase of a far more ambitious project, The Fractal Block Project, a new enclave for 45,000 inhabitants in the Russian megacity.
An innovative concept of urban blocks
The commission covered both the urban design and the architecture of all the homes and facilities. The entire neighbourhood was to be developed and built in record time and to put forward a highly innovative concept: replacing the obsolete free-standing prefabricated slabs so common in Moscow with urban blocks, more typical of European cities.
Rethinking Moscow's model of standardised architecture
To achieve these goals, our proposal developed two sets of standardised elements specifically for this neighbourhood:
– Urban Elements. Up to five different modular blocks that combine freely according to a grid optimised for solar exposure and traffic flows.
– Built Elements. By updating the local industry's standardised blocks with new typologies, up to 300 different building combinations are produced, which can still be manufactured with local industrial technology and can respond to every particular condition set by the earlier masterplan in terms of heights, setbacks and mixes of homes.
Barcelona's superblock adapted to Russia
Each group of four or six standardised blocks is treated as a superblock, giving priority to pedestrians and keeping cars out of the internal routes of the new development, with shops on the ground floors, all gathered around the schools, nurseries and other public buildings shared by every resident of the 'Spanish Quarter'.
Keeping the car out doubles the amount of open space and creates a whole fabric of squares and recreational areas generally unknown on the outskirts of Moscow.
A minimum of building components for a highly diverse housing model
Finally, working hand in hand with local industry, EDDEA carried out substantial research to rethink the local industry's design and production processes: Moscow has powerful housing factories that use concrete panels to build blocks of up to 24 storeys.
By rethinking the basic two-, three- and four-bedroom types and their different floor areas with modular platform design criteria, the 16 different home types are resolved with a very limited number of concrete elements, simplifying both the design and the construction of the buildings.
