Zilart Family House: A Terraced Pyramid for Moscow

Moscow's housing blocks are tall, flat, and repetitive. Zilart Family House is none of these. Designed by Anastasia Tretyakova and Georgiy Shchurov, the project proposes a terraced pyramid that steps down from every edge toward a central courtyard garden. Every apartment has an outdoor terrace. Every terrace has a tree. The building is a hill, not a wall.

Shortlisted in the Hustle Hub '19 competition on uni.xyz, the project addresses two problems at once: Moscow's need for density and its residents' desire for outdoor space, community, and sunlight. The stepped form solves both. It is dense (the footprint is fully occupied) and green (every step is a garden).

The Courtyard: A Village Inside a Block

The street-level render shows the project's strongest quality. You enter through a covered walkway and arrive in a central courtyard: green, planted, populated. Children play on paths. Flowers line the edges. The terraced buildings step upward on all sides, creating a sheltered microclimate. The courtyard is the building's social centre, and it is the first thing you see.

This is the oldest urban housing strategy in the world: the perimeter block with a courtyard. Moscow's Soviet-era blocks abandoned it in favour of freestanding towers. Zilart Family House recovers it and updates it with terraces, co-living, and mixed-use ground floors.

The Terraces: Outdoor Space at Every Level

The exterior render shows the stepped terraces in detail. Each step-back creates a planted outdoor space for the apartments behind it. Mature trees grow on upper levels. At ground level, a ping pong table, sun loungers, and a glass-fronted communal space open onto the courtyard. The atmosphere is closer to a Mediterranean resort than a Moscow housing block.

The stepped form has a structural benefit too. Each terrace acts as a structural shelf, transferring loads downward through the mass of the building. The pyramid is inherently stable. And because each step reduces the floor plate, every apartment above gets more light and better views than a conventional flat facade would allow.

The Plan: Colour-Coded Community

The first floor plan shows the courtyard logic clearly. Apartment units are colour-coded by type: family units, singles, and shared co-living spaces, all arranged around the central green. The variety of colours shows the variety of residents: the building is not mono-generational. Families, young professionals, and co-living groups share the same courtyard and the same ground-level amenities.

This mix is the co-living argument made spatial. Instead of separating demographics into different buildings, the project puts them in the same one and gives them a shared outdoor room. The courtyard does the social work. The plan provides the proximity.

The Sections: Stepped Massing and Diagonal Ramps

The two sections reveal the building's internal logic. The stepped profile creates terraces on every level. Ground-floor retail and cafes activate the street edge. Diagonal circulation ramps connect levels without conventional corridors, creating a continuous path from ground to rooftop that passes through shared spaces at every landing.

The diagonal ramps are the most inventive detail. They replace stairs and lifts as the primary circulation. Walking up the building is a social experience: you pass your neighbours, you see into communal spaces, you cross outdoor terraces. The ramp is the building's street, turned vertical.

The Massing: A Pyramid in the City

The aerial axonometric shows the full building mass. It is a terraced pyramid wrapping around the central courtyard, with rooftop gardens cascading down on all four sides. The form is compact, dense, and unmistakable in the skyline. It does not look like any other building in Moscow. It looks like a green hill that someone built apartments into.

This massing strategy is the project's most transferable idea. Any perimeter block can be terraced. Any terrace can be planted. Any courtyard can be shared. The Zilart Family House does not require new technology or new materials. It requires a new section. The rest follows.

Why This Project Matters

The Hustle Hub competition asked for co-living. Zilart Family House answered with a building type that makes co-living inevitable rather than optional. If you share a courtyard with 200 neighbours, you will interact with them. If every corridor is a ramp that passes communal spaces, you will use those spaces. The architecture does not rely on residents choosing to be social. It makes sociality the default.

For anyone studying terraced housing, courtyard urbanism, or the challenge of building community in high-density residential, this project demonstrates that the answer is often a section, not a programme. Step the building. Plant the steps. Share the ground.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designers: Anastasia Tretyakova, Georgiy Shchurov

Enter a Design Competition on uni.xyz

If terraced housing, courtyard urbanism, or community-driven residential design is the kind of work you want to pursue, uni.xyz runs competitions year-round that reward buildable, socially ambitious proposals.

Project credits: Zilart Family House by Anastasia Tretyakova and Georgiy Shchurov. Shortlisted, Hustle Hub '19 (uni.xyz).