A student project won the "Bridges of the Future" workshop at the Open City 2025 festival.
As part of the Open City 2025 architectural festival in Moscow, an educational workshop, "Bridges of the Future," was held under the curatorship of the ATRIUM architectural bureau . Participants—young architects and students—explored bridge typologies and proposed concepts for various urban situations. Following the presentations, the "Bridges of the Future" program was awarded a special prize by festival curator, architect and transportation architecture expert Timur Bashkaev.
One of the three key projects at the workshop was the concept for a bridge in Moscow City— a "through" skybridge that runs through the entire business cluster and offers a new level of connectivity for the vertical city. It's important to emphasize that this is a competitive, educational, and research project, not a finalized solution, but it clearly demonstrates potential development directions for the Moscow City territories.
The proposed concept envisions Moscow City as a multi-layered organism: on the one hand, it features a dense vertical development of office and residential towers, and on the other, a limited number of comfortable pedestrian routes between them. The bridge design addresses precisely this problem, creating horizontal connections within the vertical city.
Key parameters of the concept:
length - about 1 km;
height - about 100 m above ground level.
Essentially, this is not just a crossing, but an elevated city street, integrated into the Moscow City contour at a height where office entrances, apartments, public spaces, and services are already located.
The authors of the student project see the bridge as:
a new generation public space – a place for walks, meetings, and short trips between towers with panoramic views of Moscow City and the Moscow River;
a connecting link between functions - the bridge unites office centers, residential towers and the embankment, creating a more holistic and barrier-free environment within the cluster;
An extension of the urban platform , the structure does not exist on its own, but is integrated into the existing architectural and planning structure of the business center, linking transportation, infrastructure, and social spaces on a new level.
Although the "Bridge to Moscow-City" is a student workshop concept, it clearly demonstrates the direction in which the district could develop:
strengthening pedestrian connectivity between the towers;
creation of an additional “horizontal layer” of urban routes at altitude;
integration of recreational and public spaces in a purely business environment;
transition from point objects to a unified platform logic for cluster development.
This competition project can be seen as an architectural scenario for the future: it does not describe a solution that has already been adopted, but rather formulates a possible vector—the transformation of the business center from a collection of individual towers into a connected, multi-level urban complex, where bridges play a key role.
The article uses materials from the website archi.ru.
The bridge as a new "horizon" for the business center
What does the Moscow-City concept offer?
Why is this competition project important for understanding the future of Moscow City?
