Moscow International Business Center

• 1. Introduction

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  The Moscow International Business Center, better known as Moscow-City, holds the highest concentration of skyscrapers found in any one place in Europe. It rises from the Presnenskaya Embankment of the Moskva River, in Moscow's Presnensky District, roughly 4 kilometers west of Red Square. The site covers 60 hectares at the edge of the Third Ring Road. The Government of Moscow first sketched out this riverside project in 1992. What sat on that land before the towers arrived? Who ended up running a development this large, and who owns it today? And what has it cost, in fires, falls, and even a drone strike, to bring Moscow-City this far?

• 2. Scale And Ambition

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  An estimated 250,000-300,000 people are expected to be working, living, or visiting the complex at any given time once it is finished. That figure reflects a plan that never intended a single office district. Offices, homes, shops, and entertainment venues were folded together from the start.

  By 2016, twelve of the twenty-three planned facilities were already standing. Seven more were under construction, and four remained stuck at the design stage. The skyline that resulted, anchored by towers like Federation Tower, has drawn attention in architectural publications for its unusual style.

  None of those twenty-three facilities existed yet when the site looked completely different.

• 3. From Quarry To Towers

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  Before construction began, the riverside site was a stone quarry and a fading industrial zone. Most of its buildings were old factories, already closed or abandoned by the time planning started.

  A public company called CITY was created in 1992 to oversee the district's initial development and its ongoing use afterward. It served as general contractor, landlord, and lessor all at once. Overall responsibility for the complex's architectural planning fell to studio No. 6, part of the larger Moscow practice Mosproject-2, named after Mikhail Vasilyevich Posokhin. Gennady Lvovich Sirota led that studio and holds the title of Chief Architect of Moskva-Citi. He oversaw the complex's shared design, even as each individual building lot kept its own investor and architect.

  By 2014, the money invested in Moskva-City had reached approximately $12 billion. Spending on that scale needed a company built specifically to answer for it.

• 4. Who Runs Moskva-City

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  On the 30th of December 1994, the Government of Moscow authorized PJSC City to act as the MIBC's managing company. That authority let PJSC City negotiate with outside parties needed to help develop it. As of February 2014, ownership of that company sat with the Solvers Group, led by Oleg Malis.

  Under that ownership, the individual towers promised back in 1992 kept climbing toward completion, plot by plot.

• 5. Towers Of The Skyline

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  Federation Tower's two buildings took from 2003 to 2017 to complete, at a cost of roughly ₽36,830,400,000. Its taller half, the Vostok, or East, tower, reaches 374 meters across 101 floors and is currently the tallest building in Moscow.

  Mercury City Tower is a single 339 meter structure with 75 floors. It cost about ₽31,740,000,000 and was finished in 2013, four years after construction started in 2009. OKO's three towers reached 354 meters and 85 floors across 249,000 square meters, built between 2011 and 2015 for around ₽35,258,400,000. Naberezhnaya Tower, completed in 2007 after four years of work, added three more buildings reaching 268 meters and 59 floors.

  One, still under construction, is planned to rise 376 meters over 100 floors at a projected cost of ₽49,000,000,000. The older Moscow Towers project, by contrast, had its construction put on hold in 2013 before resuming in 2019. Reaching any of those upper floors was only ever half the challenge. Getting to the complex at all meant rebuilding the roads, bridges, and rail lines around it.

• 6. Reaching The Complex

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  The Bagration Bridge carries pedestrians across the Moskva River, linking the Tower 2000 building to the rest of the complex. Cars reach the district by way of the Third Ring Road, 3rd Magistralnaya Street, and the Presnenskaya Embankment. Those corridors were reconstructed and rearranged as Moscow-City grew. New infrastructure built to keep pace included the ten-lane Dorogomilovsky Bridge, carrying the Third Ring Road over the river. A new Third Ring Road interchange with Kutuzovsky Avenue followed.

  Four metro stations serve the complex. Two share the name Delovoy Tsentr, on the Filyovskaya line and the Kalininsko-Solntsevskaya line; a third, also Delovoy Tsentr, sits on the Rublyovo-Arkhangelskaya line. A fourth station, Moskva-City, serves the Filyovskaya line as well. That Rublyovo-Arkhangelskaya line stop first opened in 2018 as part of the Bolshaya Koltsevaya line. It closed in 2024 and is planned to reopen under its current line name in 2026.

  Three further urban rail stops connect the district to wider Moscow. They are Moskva-City on the Moscow Central Circle, Moskva-City on the D4, and Testovskaya on the D1. Testovskaya itself is expected to be renamed Moskva-City after reconstruction and folded into a combined transit hub covering the MCC, D4, D1, and Filyovskaya lines. All that work, underground and above it, has not gone entirely without incident.

• 7. Fires And A Drone Strike

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  On the 2nd of April 2012, a fire broke out on the 67th floor of Federation Tower's East, or Vostok, tower. It was still under construction at the time. Twenty-five fire-fighting units and four helicopters from the Moscow Aviation Center took four hours to put it out, and nobody was hurt.

  On the 25th of January 2013, fire hit the 24th floor of one of the OKO complex's towers, itself still under construction. On the 12th of January 2014, another fire reached the 15th floor of a 17-story building on Testovaya Street; it was extinguished with no injuries. On the 9th of July 2014, fire struck Evolution Tower and was put out without anyone getting hurt. At 18:45 on the 31st of August 2015, construction materials ignited a fire on the 33rd floor of Federation Tower East once again.

  On the 13th of April 2016, a worker fell to his death on Naberezhnaya Tower, presumably from around the hundredth floor. On the 18th of June 2017, a builder named Sergey Delyashov climbed the Eurasia Tower, known as Steel Peak, and was later rescued.

  On the 30th of July 2023, a drone explosion damaged the OKO-2 and IQ-quarter buildings, shattering multiple windows and injuring one person. A second attack followed on the 1st of August. Western media outlets attributed the drones to the Ukrainian military or its secret service. Experts described such attacks as tools of psychological warfare in the wider Russo-Ukrainian war.