At the base of Moscow Towers, twin 62-storey skyscrapers engineered by Germany's Werner Sobek, a different kind of work has just opened to the public. It is not a sculpture installed after the fact, nor a mural commissioned to fill a wall. It is a 32-by-11-metre diptych called Deus Particula, embedded into the building's two side lobbies and conceived as part of the architecture itself.

The collaboration brings together interior and architecture practice UNK interiors and artist Andrey Berger, with a question at its centre: what would the Gothic cathedral's vertical axis of light look like, translated into a 21st-century skyscraper?

The starting point is the building. Three connected towers — two residential, one commercial — are organized around a central beam that pulls the volumes skyward. For Berger, originally trained as an architect, the composition is like an old idea in new clothes: the same three-nave logic of a medieval cathedral, where light descends through a central axis and falls toward the altar, recast at the scale of a high-rise. His move was to imagine what happens when that vertical beam reaches the ground and breaks horizontally across the lobby walls.

The diptych answers in 14,000 mirror-finished metal plates — one panel per lobby, each plate carrying its own tilt angle and tonal value. A parametric system, developed by ContextMachine studio, choreographs the entire field. The result is a flowing pattern of gold-toned forms that recalls murmuration: a field of motion held still, shifting only as the viewer moves. "The particles don't depict light," Berger says. "They record its passage like tracks left by something that has already moved through."

What separates Deus Particula from most lobby art is the order of operations. UNK interiors did not order an artwork to fill a finished space; the installation was developed in parallel with the lobby itself, from concept onward. "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 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."

The technical groundwork sat with Berger and ContextMachine, with Arseniy Kryukov of Ars Nova curating the process. The team simulated particle flow digitally, mapped it onto a live parametric model, and tested full-scale mock-ups first in studio, then inside the lobby itself — under real lighting, against the final interior finishes. "We needed reflection, colour and spatial perception to work as a single system, not three separate effects," Kryukov says.

Berger then took the engineered surface as a substrate. Working by hand, he laid a graphic painted layer over the plates, varying brushing directions and paint densities so the light behaves differently across zones. "The parametric system holds the complexity, so the artist's line stays legible at this scale," Kryukov adds. "Technology here is a full-fledged co-author."

That partnership — between the algorithm and the hand — is also where the project sits, conceptually, for Berger. "I think a lot about the intersection of the physical and the digital, the living hand and the machine," he says. "We're in the fourth industrial revolution, and at this intersection new meanings and the future are born. That's what I wanted to bring here."