As one of the independent young offices emerging in Moscow in the 1990s, Atrium had to confront certain limits. When co-founder Anton Nadtochy graduated from Moscow Architectural Institute in 1994, writing on transformational grammar in the work of Peter Eisenman, his program was called the Theory and History of Soviet and Contemporary Foreign Architecture, where he studied constructivist and modern architecture, later working with one of its professors, Vlad Kirpichev, at his EDAS studio (www.edas-kirpichev.com). At the time, Russia was slowly opening to European and Japanese influences, which had benefitted from more competitive public design processes. But architects often say that limits animate form. Atrium’s response after the office’s 1994 founding by Vera Butko and Anton Nadtochy focused on materiality and complex geometries.
In Moscow as elsewhere, builders were figuring out how to construct theory-driven “paper architecture” that had up to then mostly been an academic provocation, rarely implemented in work-for-hire buildings. Inexpensive, off-the-shelf materials remained pervasive in interiors, but Atrium’s early projects were already raising the level of detail and space planning for corporate and private clients. The firm’s approach emphasized composition of open spatial volumes and geometries, which brought them high-profile commissions like the Novinsky Boulevard offices for Moscol company (1997–98) and the Moscow showroom for famous Italian designer furniture-maker Giulio Cappellini (2001–02).
The Serebryany Bor (“Silver Pinery”) guest house (1999–2004), designed for a client familiar with recent European architecture through travel for business, may best embody the office’s first phase of building-scale work. Located within a nature preserve fifteen minutes from central Moscow, it used a syncopation of contrasting materials, textures, and color tones, as well as the overlapping of two distinct volumes, to explore the resonance of architectural form with its ecological context. Its core orthogonal volume is extensively glazed, softened by walls with wooden cladding, its balconies penetrated by and abutting two preserved pine trees. Around it, half-enclosed in a copper roof, wraps a curving concrete canopy that nods to Le Corbusier’s Ronchamps chapel and the deconstructivist architecture of the moment.
“The main formal strategy was interaction of different shapes, different forms, and every form has its own material, and also we tried to explore complicated geometrical shapes at the time,” Nadtochy says of their early work. “Also, we were very impressed by architectural deconstruction. We tried to create intensive, dynamic space.”
In 2000, Nadtochy and Butko travelled to the Venice Architecture Biennale—the first taking place on a biennial cycle. The starchitect complex that Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilboa had helped propel forward was gaining ground, and the exhibition, entitled Less Aesthetics, More Ethics, curated by Massimiliano Fuksas, was meant to rethink architecture on an urban and metropolitan scale. But for Atrium it represented a watershed in part for the ongoing prominence of form-makers—among them Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Wolf Prix, Thom Mayne, Peter Cook, Toyo Ito, Greg Lynn, Neil Denari, and Ben Van Berkel, . It launched the office on a new trajectory of sculptural architecture—equally influenced by 1960s figures such as Verner Panton, Luigi Colani, Antti Lovag and André Bloc—that sought to heighten aesthetic experience and anticipate another future.
While the Barkli Park residential complex (2007–2013) in Moscow still reflected the first phase of its activities, combining apartments cantilevered over a sports facility into single fluctuating development, for the next decade or so, projects like the house in Gorky (2004–11), KVN (2012–13), and the Krasnodar Expo pavilion (2014–) found Atrium designing larger and larger structures, using light colors to express biomorphic forms. At the same time, the scale of the single-family home and radical transformations of apartment interiors also figured into the second phase of Atrium’s oeuvre in projects like private houses at Sosni Village and Malakhovka, and apartments in Obydensky Lane and Zhukovka Village, where the legacy of the deconstruction in architecture is expressed in the breaking open of spaces through refractive elements. The intersection of two shapes remained a method of iterating the relationship between a building’s functional core and its exterior expression, and they continued to balance sculptural gestures with contrasting textures of materials. They softened the hard-edge formalism of the overall composition at the Gorky house with warm tones of stained wood. In Barkli Park, the glazed and concrete formed are offset by red brick-clad volumes. In Krasnodar, the complex is a syncopation of glass with gray and white panels.
Atrium’s recent ambitions have gotten more expansive, thinking at the scale of entire development complexes, cities, and regions. In the competition for Olonkholand in the Arctic city of Yakutk, Lake Tuvatui in the Ural Mountain of Siberia, and a downtown development for Veliko Tarnovo, Bulgaria, they developed schemes for connecting architecture and landscape to the identity of places and their meaning to local inhabitants, amplifying their cultural identities within the context of globalizing economic forces.
“Symbolic structures are becoming more and more important, especially when we work in very specific regions,” Vera Butko says. “Now it’s becoming more and more important for us how to define local identity or create a new identity of a territory.”
This strategy is particularly apparent in Atrium’s competition for Tobolsk, a city in Siberia where vernacular log structures are identified with the history of the region. Atrium’s design for a multifunctional cultural center begins from an original wooden structure and extrudes it into a complex parametric form to house an open amphitheater, a coworking space, education/ afterschool programs, an auditorium for dancing and singing, and ultimately, a new city square with landscaped hills and parking below. It evokes the kind of urban space that Kevin Lynch wrote about in The Image of the City: not a solitary object but a moving set of parts, perceived from a variety of positions, fragmented by individual experiences; a composite, constantly modified by different users.
“This mix of simple shapes creates a new complicated architectural shape,” Nadtochy says. “We see it as a visible and clear symbol, but on the other hand, the spatial structure is not so simple. From a spatial point of view and in terms of movement inside the building, there are many rules of movement connected to the surrounding landscape.”
Atrium’s most recent commissions in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Sochi, and Almaty reflect an extended embrace of complexity and a multifaceted approach to design and project delivery, which has been met by public planning policies that encourage innovation of building silhouettes and shapes, beyond surface materials. “It’s a good trend, and we are very happy about it, because we were always thinking about shapes more than facades,” says Nadtochy. “Facades are just decoration. The visual diversity of this environment is important.”
In its Symbol complex of residential towers on the grounds of a former Serp and Molot (“Hammer and Sickle”) metal fabrication company and its Primavera towers on the site of the former Tushino airfield, both located just outside of Moscow, gentle curvatures of building envelopes and a play of light and dark materials on facades combine with urban design on the ground plane that recalls the best qualities of old historic cities, in which streetscapes flowed in sync with the sloping topography of rivers and landscapes. Atrium’s Pedestrian Green and Zil bridge projects in Almaty and Moscow equally fuse soothing non-orthogonal lines across urban infrastructures, softened by naturalized features and animated with lighting schemes that respond to the human need for greenery and visual stimulation.
It’s a set of ideas that the office is applying even when it comes to an extensive school in Sochi, skyscrapers in Moscow, an all-seasons eco-gallery in St. Petersburg, speculative developments from its new office in the United Arab Emirates, and experiments in virtual interactive spaces for the first Metaverse Architectural Biennale. In the challenging environment of 2020s, Atrium has managed to not only survive but create dynamic work that engages public space and imagines another future. “The situation is very unstable,” says Nadtochy. “What could architecture be if it doesn’t have the restrictions which we have in real architecture?”
