Territoriya building renovation concept

Territoriya is a network of buildings that rent out spaces to small and medium businesses. Overall, there are 22 such locations all over Moscow, all of them former automatic telephone exchange buildings.

Automatic telephone exchanges were a real technological breakthrough of the previous century: instead of live operators, subscribers were connected by relay systems. It became possible to have a telephone in every apartment, and for that reason multi-storey buildings were constructed in the middle of residential districts, housing people, bulky machinery and kilometers of wires. The mysterious building was the pride of any resident who received a landline, it was the place where phone magic lived.

In the age of modern electronics, relay cabinets became obsolete and vacant spacious floors were turned into spaces for sports, education and business. The buildings have changed inside, but their external appearance is still a reminder of the bygone Soviet era.

The feeling of magic was seemingly lost forever. However, there is a way to return the buildings into the context of a modern city without rebuilding them, to give them a new energy and make them the center of attention once again. And that is a new façade design.

Even though the former telephone exchange buildings stand out both with their architecture and materials (bricks, panels), they can be brought to a unified style by being painted in a solid graphite color. Dark-colored buildings are a rare phenomenon for Russia.

A dark-colored building in itself is a major event for a city, and a network of such buildings all around Moscow can become a new hallmark of Territoriya. The buildings are covered with paint completely, hiding imperfections of the surfaces and refreshing their appearance. The deep graphite color becomes a spectacular background for colorful graffiti created for each of the locations.