“The park should describe the Russian soul. A place where you can hide and where you can also see everything around you.” – Petr Kudryavtsev, Partner at Citymakers
The architects behind New York’s High Line have created a new urban space that reflects the diversity of Russia’s regional landscapes. Zaryadye defies the norms of a “formal park” in Russia by providing space where anyone can walk in any direction and people could gather, with the central design principle of “urbanity gives up to nature.”
Mary Margaret Jones of Hargreaves Associates digs deeper into this design principle that was an unusual one for Russia: “When you look at landscape in Russian fairy tales and literature, you see that nature is outside of the city and something ‘other.’ ”
Unusual or not, the impact of Zaryadye Park is clear; the park has been a huge success, being visited to by over 9.5 million people.