Stefano Boeri Architetti Converts Tbilisi Locomotive Factory into Loco Park

Stefano Boeri Architetti has won an international competition to transform a 73,600-square-meter Soviet-era locomotive factory in Tbilisi, Georgia, into a residential neighborhood named Loco Park. The Milan-based studio developed the masterplan for LOCO Alliance, and the project now moves into development with a planned gross floor area of 120,000 square meters.

The win gives the Italian firm, known for its vertical forest towers, its most consequential foothold in the Caucasus region to date — and gives Tbilisi a template for reusing industrial land without erasing it.

What does the masterplan propose?

Loco Park replaces the locomotive production site with nine residential buildings set in a continuous landscape of public and semi-public spaces. The scheme rejects the enclosed residential compound. Instead, it stitches pedestrian connections to neighboring districts through green areas, shared gardens, and a linear boulevard. A dedicated sports forest adds recreational facilities to the landscape.

The architects treat the nine structures as individual architectural volumes linked by a common network of open spaces rather than as a single superblock. Stefano Boeri describes the buildings as 'islands in an urban archipelago,' connected by tree-lined pedestrian spaces that stay open to the wider city.

For practitioners, the operative move is the section at street level. Ground floors accommodate shops, cafés, workshops, and shared services, which the architects intend to keep active around the clock. Above, apartments of different sizes serve varying residential needs, pairing private living space with communal areas accessible only to residents.

How does the design carry the industrial heritage?

The rooflines take their silhouettes from the factories and workshops that once occupied the site, and their varied geometries produce a new skyline across the district. The roofs are not scenography alone. According to the architects, the configurations host greenhouses, terraces, loft apartments, photovoltaic systems, and shared outdoor spaces, while optimizing natural lighting, ventilation, and solar exposure.

That stacking — energy generation, food production, and housing on one roof section — mirrors the programmatic mixing Boeri has tested elsewhere, now applied to a post-industrial Georgian context.

Why brick, and why those colors?

Materiality anchors the scheme to its city. Stefano Boeri Architetti carried out a photographic color study of Tbilisi's built environment and identified a palette of blue-grey, terracotta, green, taupe, and mineral white. Those tones inform the brick facades, which combine different colors, textures, and laying patterns to give each of the nine buildings an individual identity.

The choice of brick does double duty: it references both the factory's industrial past and the city's local construction traditions. In a district built entirely new on old ground, the facade study is the mechanism that keeps the architecture from reading as an import.

What changes for the site and the city?

Loco Park consolidates residential, recreational, and public functions within a single urban redevelopment on the former factory grounds. The proposal places particular emphasis on the relationship between architecture and landscape, using interconnected green spaces to integrate the industrial site into Tbilisi's everyday life — replacing a locomotive production function with housing and shared urban infrastructure.

The project is currently in development following the competition win. No completion date has been announced. If delivered as designed, Loco Park would give Tbilisi a replicable model: industrial heritage kept as silhouette and material memory, public space running through rather than around the new district, and a post-Soviet factory site returned to the city that surrounded it.

Project information:

• Name: Loco Park
• Architect: Stefano Boeri Architetti
• Location: Tbilisi, Georgia
• Developer: LOCO Alliance
• Site area: 73,600 square meters
• Planned gross floor area: 120,000 square meters

By Marcus Bennett