MICROSS: Co-Living as a Living Organism in the Urban Grid

What happens when a city's immune system fails? When every block looks the same and every courtyard reads as geometric filler, the urban fabric stagnates. MICROSS proposes the antidote: a co-living complex that operates less like a building and more like a virus, injecting fragmented geometries, intersecting volumes, and protruding beams into a monotonous grid. The project treats its central courtyard as a neural core, routing residents through branching pathways that resist right angles and encourage the kind of unplanned encounters that sustain creative communities.

Designed by Sasha Shilkin and Davit Antonyan, MICROSS maps a metaphor of the human brain onto a residential perimeter block. Every inhabitant is framed as a creative impulse, transmitting energy through shared spatial networks rather than retreating into isolated units. The result is a co-living scheme where working, living, and making collapse into one continuous loop, all organized around a courtyard that the designers describe not as decorative middle ground but as the beating heart of the built organism.

A Courtyard That Branches Like a Neural Network

The isometric view immediately signals that MICROSS is not a typical courtyard block. Residential volumes ring a terraced central landscape covered in planted green roofs, but the terrain between them is anything but flat. Paths branch and fork organically, mimicking the dendritic patterns of nerve cells. The designers lean into this metaphor with conviction: the courtyard redistributes energy, redirects movement, and acts as the spatial equivalent of a synapse, firing connections between residents who might otherwise never cross paths.

The perspective sketches reinforce how the curving rooftop landscape and angular building volumes create a constant tension between organic flow and architectural mass. Viewed from multiple angles, the complex shifts dramatically; no single vantage point captures its full logic, which is precisely the point. MICROSS resists legibility at a glance, demanding that inhabitants explore it over time.

Radiating Garden Paths and the Perimeter Block Reimagined

The ground floor plan reads like a landscape diagram rather than an architectural drawing. Radiating garden paths fan outward from the courtyard's center, threading between residential perimeter blocks that define the project's edges. A section cut through the complex reveals how the planted zones slope and terrace, allowing light and air to penetrate deep into the interior. The strategy is straightforward: use the courtyard not as leftover space but as primary infrastructure, organizing circulation, planting, and social gathering in a single continuous surface.

At the first floor level, the drawings show how white circulation paths weave between planted roof zones, creating elevated walkways that connect residential wings without forcing everyone through a single corridor. The elevation studies confirm that the green roof layers are not afterthoughts; they are integral to the section, mediating between private dwelling spaces above and the shared landscape below. Every drawing reinforces the same principle: architecture here serves the courtyard, not the other way around.

Residential Wings Scaled to Community

The sectional plans of individual residential wings reveal how MICROSS calibrates its scale to different group sizes. One wing terminates in a curved bay at its northern end, housing units oriented to capture views across the courtyard. The paired southern wings meet at the curved edge of the courtyard, and annotated occupancy groups clarify how the designers distribute residents across the complex. Scale figures confirm that the sections maintain a human proportion; despite the project's ambitious formal language, ceilings and corridors remain intimate rather than monumental.

The upper levels are devoted to working premises tailored for creative professions. Jutting beams, unexpected angles, and expressive spatial gestures define a "Work & Play" zone that integrates coworking areas, workshops, studios, and informal meeting pockets. The intentional spatial chaos mirrors the moment of ideation, when thoughts collide before cohering into something new. By stacking living below and making above, MICROSS compresses the daily commute to a single staircase.

The Virus Metaphor: Disruption as Design Strategy

The project's manifesto declares that when a city devolves into "a boring grid of similar anthills," it needs a virus to catalyze transformation. MICROSS embraces that role without apology. Fragmented geometries and layered platforms break the rhythm of surrounding blocks, and the building's formal restlessness is legible from every approach. The metaphor is provocative, but the spatial evidence supports it: this is a complex that generates friction, and friction, in the designers' view, is what keeps urban life alive.

Why This Project Matters

MICROSS succeeds because it takes its own metaphor seriously. Calling a courtyard a neural core is easy; designing branching pathways, terraced green roofs, and layered work zones that actually function as interconnected networks is harder. Shilkin and Antonyan move beyond diagram and into architecture, producing plans and sections where the courtyard genuinely organizes the building rather than sitting passively inside it.

The broader proposition is worth debating: that sustainable urban architecture must trade standardization for complexity, and predictability for spontaneity. In a landscape of co-living projects that default to efficient floor plates and polite communal kitchens, MICROSS argues for something messier and more alive. The virus may be conceptual, but the spatial ambition is real, and the built environment could use more disruptions like it.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designers: Sasha Shilkin, Davit Antonyan

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Project credits: MICROSS by Sasha Shilkin, Davit Antonyan.