Construction of Zaryadye park, designed by a New York-based studio to fill the vacant lot once occupied by the Rossiya hotel, will take at least two years, Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said Tuesday.
He called the design by Diller Scofidio Renfro, featuring four different landscape zones — tundra, steppe, forest and marsh — a "pretty project," Komsomolskaya Pravda reported.
But construction "will take two to three years minimum," Sobyanin said. "The construction must be orderly and unhurried, because this is truly a unique project."
The design envisages creating a smooth landscape flow between the park and the Moskva River and the Moskvoretskaya Embankment, and making the Bolshoi Moskvorestky bridge mostly pedestrian, Sobyanin said.
Once completed, the park is likely to receive 10,000 to 100,000 people a day, "depending on the time of the year," he said.
Diller Scofidio Renfro, which also created the High Line park on a historic elevated train line in Manhattan, won the Zaryadye project in competition against 87 proposals by 450 companies from 27 countries.
