Residual Russia - Louis Koehl

Residual Russia is a proposal for the re-activation of the abandoned ZiL Automotive Factory in Moscow.  The project treats the site as a substrate for the development of a new social microcosm amongst the industrial wasteland that surrounds the outer reaches of Moscow.  This microcosm is broken down into four programmatically distinct sectors.  Each sector is elevated above the existing site and serviced by its own specially designed monorail.  In some instances the train itself supports part of the sector’s program.  These sectors are all linked together with special zones of overlap and link directly into the Moskva Metro Subway System at two separate points providing fluid accessibility from this new city and its progenitor.  The sectors are as follows:

1) Research-Based City - A Research Institute and technical university providing higher education to residents of this microcosm and focused on finding new and productive ways to work with the industrial residue left behind by the Manufacturing-centric Soviet Union.

2) ZiL Prospekt - The main cultural avenue of the project.  Sitting on the banks of the Moscow-Reka, this sector contains retail, entertainment facilities, an academy for the study of performance and visual art and a new theatre complex.  At the intersection of this sector and the Research Institute is an enormous archive, built as a permanent home to the wide range of scientific and artistic experimentation that has occurred in Russia over the past two centuries of radical socio-political turmoil.

3) The Nikolai Vavilov Cohabitation Cooperative - Nikolai Vavilov was a Soviet botanist who travelled the globe collecting and genetically engineering a variety of new and previously undiscovered plant species.  His collection helped form the largest seed bank in the world.  The seed bank survived Lenin’s Red Terror, the Nazi occupation of Leningrad, and Stalin’s infamous purges of the scientific elite.  Despite overcoming all that adversity, the seed bank is currently at risk of being destroyed and replaced by luxury housing (http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/sep/20/campaign-russia-pavlovsk-seed-bank).  The Co-habitation Cooperative uses single family housing as a module for maintaining the seed bank.  The whole sector sits above what is currently the Nagatinskaya Park that will be converted into a park for Vavilov’s experiments and each housing unit around the ring is equipped with a specific amount of garden space with which they will be responsible for growing and caring for a designated plant species.

4) Kommunalka Kommunity - This last sector is an attempt to use the Soviet model of communal housing developments in a way that will establish a well-integrated community within the walls of the ZiL Auto Factory.  Five large developments are established within the sector and they surround a series of public parks, education facilities, and sporting complexes that exist within the circle on the rooftops of the existing factories.