For the newly completed Moscow Towers, a pair of 62-storey skyscrapers designed by German engineer Werner Sobek, Russian architecture practice UNK interiors has collaborated with artist Andrey Berger on 'Deus Particula', a monumental diptych rooted in a design principle borrowed from Gothic cathedrals: the vertical axis of light.
The Moscow Towers complex consists of three connected towers: two side volumes house residential apartments, while the central one is dedicated to offices. The entire architecture grows from the image of a beam of light striking the centre and pulling the towers upward, connecting them to the sky.
Each tower has its own lobby, and this division closely echoes the three-nave composition of a Gothic cathedral: a central nave leading to the altar, flanked by two side naves, with descending light falling directly onto the altar. Berger brings these two traditions together, the beam and the upward reach of Gothic architecture, because high-rise construction inherits the same striving upward. His intervention imagines what happens when that beam reaches the lobby floor and disperses horizontally across the walls.
The resulting installation spans two ground-floor lobbies. Each side lobby holds one panel of the diptych, measuring 32 by 11 metres and assembled from 14,000 individually angled, mirror-finished metal plates. Their tilt angles and tonal values are choreographed by a parametric system, producing a flowing field of gold-toned forms reminiscent of murmuration, the coordinated motion of a flock. It shifts constantly as visitors move through the space. The particles, as Berger describes them, do not depict light itself; they record its passage, like tracks left by something that has already moved through.
Rather than commissioning a standalone artwork after construction was complete, UNK interiors developed the installation in parallel with the lobby design from the earliest concept stage.
"Our core objective was to bridge the gap between the building's spatial magnitude and human scale," says Yulia Tryaskina, creative director at UNK interiors. "Moscow City as a district almost entirely lacked public art that could anchor a sense of place. We wanted the lobby to function as an extension of the city, not just an entrance to an office building."
Berger developed the parametric system together with ContextMachine studio, working from the logic of his original sketch. Arseniy Kryukov of Ars Nova curated the process. The team simulated the particle flow digitally, then mapped the composition onto an active model that assigned a unique angle and tone to each of the 14,000 plates.
Full-scale mock-ups were built and tested, first in studio conditions, then installed inside the actual lobby, under real lighting and against the final interior materials. "We needed to make sure that reflection, colour and spatial perception would work as one system, not three separate effects," Kryukov says.
On top of the engineered reflective surface, Berger applied a hand-painted graphic layer. Different brushing directions and paint densities interact with the metal finish, steering light differently across zones of the panel. "The parametric system holds the complexity — thousands of unique angles and values — so that the artist's line remains legible at this scale," Kryukov adds. "Technology here acts as a full-fledged co-author."
For Berger, originally trained as an architect, the project belongs to a longer investigation running through his practice. "I work and think a lot about the intersection of the physical and the digital, the living hand and the machine," he says. "These two different entities, physical and digital, or physical and engineered, constantly collide in my practice. We're living through the fourth industrial revolution, through an extremely rapid digitization, and it's at this intersection that new meanings and the future are born. That's exactly what I wanted to bring into this work."
