The Narkomfin Building is more than just architecture — it’s an entire era cast in concrete and glass.
In 2018, the Archnasledie (Architectural Heritage) Festival invited students to ask: What if we could live the building all over again? The task was to reimagine one of the iconic units — an upper or lower Type F cell — and envision how a modern person might inhabit it, what kind of story that small fragment of space could tell today.
Under the guidance of the Russian Interior course and the Detalі School, I developed a design project for such a unit. What’s brilliant about this structure is the very concept: it’s not just the square footage that matters, but the volume — the cubic space of life these walls contain. I based the color palette on Le Corbusier’s Polychromie Architecturale — a classic of the 1930s that seems to come alive here, shifting with the light and mood.