European Square in Kiev

The Khreshchatyk metropolitan artery is a conglomerate of the past century’s multiple architectural tendencies. Eclectic and early-modernist tenements neighbour here on pompous socialist realism and shoddy socialist modernism of the 1960s and ‘70s. What links them is monumentalism, specific massing and, surprisingly, quite uniform textures and materials.
The architectural formula underlying the design of a residential-hotel-office tower selected in the competition had to allow for this common feature while offering an air of novelty, lightness and optimism of the new era.
Apart from the street context, the building had to face the problem of the nearby European Square, become a conscious element of its spatial composition.
Light, vertical stone grids with diversified densities and light-and-shade effects cover four staggered masses, the lowest of which links the building to the scale of Khreshchatyk, and the highest emphasises the axial composition of the square. This configuration of masses has made it possible to avoid the effect of a high-rise building set on a “podium” and offered an attractive arrangement of the section, where a multi-level hall, illuminated through internal gardens, becomes the “soul” of the building.