Architecture Competition Greening the Industrial City 1st prize winners – Pavel Nishchanka, Olga Dolinina, Yuri Korolev and Yuliya Nesviatayeva

We’d like to take the opportunity to introduce you to the 1st prize winners of our "Greening the Industrial City" competition – Pavel Nishchanka, Olga Dolinina, Yuri Korolev and Yuliya Nesviatayeva from Belarus!

1st prize winners from Belarus

The company was founded in 2012 in Minsk, Belarus. Growing from small private houses and interiors to design of residential complexes, in 2018 it went international. At the moment we’ve got offices in 4 countries, 250+projects scale from an apartment to a 7000ha development and a team of 20+ professionals. 

Brief information about the projects that you/your company have been involved with. For instance, what scale have you focused on/preferred, any significant projects where the company/ individuals have been involved?

The company unites 4 main directions: 1. urban planning; 2. urban design; 3. multistory residential & public architecture; 4. private houses and interiors. The balance is attained as there’s a separate creative leader for each of these directions - the distribution natural to their strengths and interests. At the same time the synergy between the directions, when needed, lets us take any scale up and elaborate it to the smallest details. We’ve made landscape design for courtyards, parks, boulevards and squares; masterplans from a small district some 5ha to a semi-city 7000 ha - usually within record-tight deadlines; residential architecture for these territories in typologies from townhouses to urban-villas and apartment blocks; and private residential spaces from small prefab houses (our separate passion) up to 4 stories per villa.

What does architecture mean to you and what is the role of an architect in your society?

We believe that the right environment makes people happier. Considerate design is not just an interesting shape or attractive packaging, but a tool that creates positive emotions and sets scenarios for behavior in the community. We’ve witnessed it in our residential projects in Minsk (Novaya Baravaya) that created the communities of the strength previously unseen in the city. One of the creators and co founders lives there due to this, by the way. What we create will exist for a long time, and lots of people will actively interact with it. Thus we take our vocation with full responsibility, while always open to face some new challenge.

Why do you participate in architecture competitions?

As we said above, we’re happy to take up new challenges: new context, new problem-solution setting, and new continents:) Win is fun, getting known in the new markets is great for business, but the key is learning and getting stronger after every new case - the skills we later apply for our work with Customers.

What advice would you give to individuals who struggle to decide whether it would be beneficial for them to participate in architecture competitions?

Competitions are usually about unconventional challenges in unconventional contexts - an excellent exercise for mind and teamwork. Thus the least one gets when participating is a new neural connection, project for a website portfolio and motivation to become better. While in the case of winning it’s a set of countable benefits in the form of recognition and publications on the target market, sometimes a financial bonus, and sometimes a new contract to detail the project designed for the competition. Thus the advice is to determine the target market and/or type of challenge you want to take up, set the budget, encounter a competition you find fascinating while sticking to the budget, treat the costs of participation as an investment, and head towards the new challenge.