Beside the Moskva River and a minute’s walk from the Kremlin and Red Square, the Zaryadye was an over 50,000-square-meter urban void between Moscow’s tourist zone and the Kitay-Gorod business district. This area, inhabited in the past, has a troubled history and was destroyed by Stalin’s reconstruction plans to occupy the Eighth Sister tower, never carried out. Then came a succession of refurbishment projects. The world’s largest hotel, the Rossiya, went up in 1967 and came down in 2006, and in January 2012 the mayor’s office held an international competition for the country’s first new public park since 1957, won by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, in collaboration with Hargreaves Associates and Citymakers.

Based on the concept of ‘wild urbanism,’ which integrates the built and the natural in hybrid landscapes, the park presents four biomass types in terraces arranged from northeast to southwest: the tundra, the steppe, the forest, and the wetlands. The ambitious park includes a series of curvilinear buildings containing 14,000 square meters of restaurants, exhibition spaces, a philharmonic concert hall, and cantilevers from which people can enjoy sweeping views of the surroundings.