The park by Diller Scofidio + Renfro in Moscow blends nature and city

Centrally located steps from St. Basil’s Cathedral, Red Square and the Kremlin, Zaryadye Park sits on a historically charged site saturated by both Russia’s collective past and evolving aspirations. In 2012, the City of Moscow and Chief Architect Sergey Kuznetsov organized a design competition to transform this historically privatized, commercial territory into a public park. An international design consortium led by Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R) was selected out of ninety submissions representing 27 different countries.

Zaryadye provides a public space that resists easy categorization. It is at once park, urban plaza, social space, cultural amenity, and
recreational armature. To achieve this simultaneity, natural landscapes are overlaid on top of constructed environments, creating a series of elemental face-offs between the natural and the artificial, urban and rural, interior and exterior.

The intertwining of landscape and hardscape creates a ‘Wild Urbanism’, introducing a new offering to compliment Moscow’s historically formal, symmetrical park spaces. A custom stone paving system knits hardscape and landscape together— generating a blend rather than a border — encouraging visitors to meander freely. Zaryadye Park is the missing link that completes the collection of world-famous monuments and urban districts forming central Moscow. Natural zones provide places of gathering, repose and observation, in concert with performance spaces and enclosed cultural pavilions.