a journal entry
Someone else’s home
ДОМА · Naram Ziady & Sami
Close the book and walk through the flat first, if you haven’t yet. Then come back and read it room by room.
These buildings aren’t my home memory. They belong to the people who live in them. I only ever arrived as a guest: up a shared stairwell, through someone’s front door, into a flat that was exactly like every other flat in the block, and nothing like any of them.
Sami and I made ДОМА to hold on to that feeling. It’s a walk through one of those flats, and a small attempt to show how a single design, repeated millions of times, became millions of different homes.
Close this and scroll; the walk takes about five minutes. Come back after, if you like.
Подъезд The stairwellEvery visit starts here, in the part of the building that belongs to everyone and no one. Glossy paint to waist shoulder height where hands and bags rub the wall, whitewash above. The same in every block, from one end of the country to the other.
In the walk, this is where the words begin to appear beside you, a few at a time, and fall away as you pass. The way things come back when you return somewhere.
Кухня The kitchenIt was built tiny, about five six square metres, on the assumption that people would eat in canteens. They didn’t. It became the room where everything was said: tea, gossip, the conversations that went on far too late.
We lit it the way a kitchen is remembered, not the way it looks. Soft, a little too bright at the window, like a dream of it. There’s a radio playing. You hear it from the hall before you see it.
Зал The living roomEvery family was given this room. What they did with it is the whole story. A rug carpet on the wall against the cold. A polished wall unit with crystal behind the glass. A sofa that unfolded into a bed at night, in a room that was also the dining room and the guest room.
Inside the flat there’s a slider. Move it from as lived to as designed and everything a family brought dissolves, leaving the room exactly as the state delivered it. Move it back and it becomes someone’s again. The building never changes. Home is what people carried in.
Балкон The balconyWith nowhere inside to keep anything, the balcony became the attic, cellar, the pantry and the washing line. Jars, skis, a bicycle, laundry in every season. Later, people glazed them by hand, because it was the only way to make a standard flat bigger.
None of this was planned. It happened there because of the building, and it happened on every floor.
Через дорогу Across the roadThe walk doesn’t end in the flat. Across the road a new block is going up, panel by panel, the way they really were built: floor slabs, walls with the windows already in, a whole bathroom lowered in by crane.
You climb in through a window and watch the same room fill again, but it isn’t the same. Another family chose striped green paper, a green carpet for the wall, a mustard sofa, pale wood. Same walls, same windows, same plan. Their home.
Память MemoryIn the corner there’s a small tab marked Memory . Open it and slide it up, and the place starts to go, the way places do. Colour drains, the edges go first, nothing stays sharp, and sound comes to you as if through a wall.
Slide it all the way and almost everything is gone. What’s left is the shape: a tall, pale rectangle with rows of windows. That’s the thing about this architecture. You can forget the rooms, the carpets, whose flat it was. You don’t forget the rooms building.
Как мы это сделали How we made itWe made this together, Sami and I. It started much more realistic literal: a world that looked scanned, text pinned to the walls like signs, warm golden light. Every version that looked more accurate felt less true. So we kept taking things away, until what was left felt like remembering rather than looking.
The flat is a composite, not any one family’s home. The light comes from Tarkovsky’s Stalker , grey and wet, with seasons that change it. The facts come from the sources at the back. It runs in the browser, built with three.js, with Claude helping write the code.
At the back of the notebook PhotographsThe district The threshold The living room The kitchen Background
After a 1955 decree against “excesses” in architecture, the Soviet state set out to give every family a flat of its own, built from factory-made concrete panels. Engineer Vitaly Lagutenko’s K-7 series is usually credited as the template; series such as 1-464 carried the same kit across the country.
Reference photographs supplied for this project; photographers and buildings unverified. Kitchen radio: period broadcasts of Radio Mayak (1970), Radio Rodina and Radio Peace and Progress, supplied for this project (provenance unverified). All other sound is synthesised.
How to move around
Keyboard and mouse controls
To… …do this
Travel Scroll. The bar at the bottom turns the page; tap its title for the list of chapters Memory Open the tab bottom left, then drag, click a word, scroll or use the arrow keys Walk the flat Walk around the flat (inside the flat) or G ; W A S D , Esc frees the mouseFly around Settings or F ; drag to orbit, W A S D , Q /E Season & sound Settings , top right; M for soundThis journal Grab a page and pull it over, or use ‹ › and the arrow keys; Printed text swaps the handwriting for print
For everyone who opened their door to a guest.
ДОМА · Naram Ziady & Sami · 2026