The Home: A Red Glass Cone Turns a Quiet Concrete Block into a Living Room for Students Abroad

Q: Who wrote "The Home: A Red Glass Cone Turns a Quiet Concrete Block into a Living Room for Students Abroad"?

This article was written by UNI Editorial and published on uni.xyz, a platform for design professionals and creative thinkers.

Q: What is "The Home: A Red Glass Cone Turns a Quiet Concrete Block into a Living Room for Students Abroad" about?

This article covers topics related to Residential Building, Public Building, Living Building, Hospitality Building, Student Housing, Container House, Residential Design. A community center for international students that keeps its gray face to the river and saves its warmth for a red, tree-filled atrium at the back.

A community center for international students that keeps its gray face to the river and saves its warmth for a red, tree-filled atrium at the back.

5 min read·2 reads

Homesickness is rarely cured by grand gestures. It eases at a kitchen table, on a sofa shared with strangers who slowly become friends, in a room where someone left the lights on. A building that wants to stand in for home has to understand this. It has to be calm where a city is loud, and warm where a new life feels cold. The most persuasive thing about this proposal is that it knows exactly where to spend its warmth.

The Home by Екатерина Рубцова is a community center for international students, designed to help them adapt to a new way of living away from their homeland. Its stated ambition is simple and demanding: a place where every student feels welcome and comfortable, "a place like home, away from home," where the student community becomes a new big family for those who travel abroad. The project was Shortlisted at Overseas Oasis 2020.

A Reserved Concrete Face That Lets the Street Keep Its Rhythm

Seen from the river, The Home plays it cool. The main facade is a gray concrete mass punctured by slim vertical windows, arranged in loose clusters rather than a strict grid, so the wall reads as textured instead of monotonous. The only flourishes are horizontal: a rounded corner that peels away from the box as it rises, a curved glazed bay hovering above the ground floor, and a glass pavilion set back on the roof. The base is generously glazed, with tables spilling out toward the embankment where cyclists pass beneath autumn trees.

This restraint reads as a deliberate choice rather than timidity. A building for newcomers that shouts would become a landmark of difference. By keeping the street elevation neutral and letting the ground floor open toward passersby, the design places students inside the ordinary life of the neighborhood instead of on display beside it. The curved corner does the quiet work of welcome, softening the block exactly where people approach it.

Rendered main view of the gray concrete facade with slim vertical windows, seen across a river and stone embankment under an overcast sky. Image: Екатерина Рубцова

Rendered corner view of the gray concrete block with a curved lower bay and glazed rooftop pavilion, cyclists passing under autumn trees. Image: Екатерина Рубцова

The Red Cone Out Back Is Where the Building Finally Speaks

Walk around to the backyard and the mood flips. A conical glass volume, widening as it climbs, is laced with red steel diagonals and red mesh at its crown, ringed with strings of lights at each floor. Through the glazing you can see trees, balconies and figures stacked above one another. It is the one vivid accent in an otherwise monochrome composition, and it faces the garden rather than the street, which tells you who it is really for.

The yard in front of it is planned like a domestic garden scaled up for a crowd: a striped path leads straight to the cone's base, flanked by raised timber planter beds, round picnic tables and small red pergolas that echo the steel of the facade. This is a backyard in the most familiar sense, a place to plant something, eat outdoors and linger. Pairing the building's most theatrical element with its most homely outdoor space is the project's sharpest move.

Rendered backyard view of the red steel-framed conical glass volume above a striped path and raised planter beds with picnic tables, in autumn. Image: Екатерина Рубцова

A Living Room Built Around Curved Sofas and Indoor Trees

Inside the cone, the label on the drawing is telling: this is a living room, not a lobby or an atrium. Curved gray sofas form open rings and arcs, inviting groups to gather without assigning anyone a head of the table. Full-size trees rise from oversized red planters, their canopies reaching toward the curved balconies above, while angled red mesh panels lean against the timber-clad back wall. A ring of ceiling lights traces the edge of the void.

What makes the space work is its layering. Upper floors overlook the room through curved balustrades, so someone studying or passing upstairs remains visually part of the gathering below. The furniture is soft and loosely arranged, the trees bring in a sense of season, and the light pours through the tilted glass. It is a convincing translation of the brief's family metaphor: a shared central room that everyone passes through and nobody owns.

Rendered living room interior with curved gray sofas, potted trees in red planters and red mesh panels beneath a ring of ceiling lights. Image: Екатерина Рубцова

A Section That Reads Like a Crowded Family House

The section drawing makes the organization legible at a glance. Four floors stack on the left within the orthogonal concrete frame, tied together by a central stair void, while the tapering red-framed glass volume swells on the right, each floor slab pushing a little further outward as it rises. At the top, the cone resolves into stepped seating open to the sky, turning the roof into a terrace for the whole community.

The drawing is filled with red silhouetted figures on every level: sitting at tables, leaning on rails, climbing stairs, gathering on the roof. That choice of representation is a statement of intent. The building is imagined as busy and sociable throughout, with the stair void and the cone acting as two vertical connectors that keep every floor in sight of the others, much as voices carry between rooms in a crowded house.

Section drawing showing four floors, a central stair void and the tapering red-framed glass volume, filled with red silhouetted figures. Image: Екатерина Рубцова

Why This Project Matters

Buildings for international students are often treated as logistics: beds, desks, a reception counter. The Home argues that adaptation is an emotional process and that architecture can carry part of that load. Its strategy is clear and transferable: stay neutral and porous toward the city, then concentrate warmth, color and life in a single shared heart that faces a garden. The contrast between the gray block and the red cone is more than a formal trick; it maps the difference between public and familial space.

There is a lesson here for any designer working on community buildings. Comfort does not come from adding more amenities; it comes from a room people want to return to, with soft seating, living trees, views between floors and an open door to a backyard. By choosing to call its central space a living room and designing it like one, this proposal reminds us that the most generous gesture a building can make for people far from home is to give them somewhere to simply sit together.