When a leading electrical equipment manufacturer moves into a former Bolshevik factory, the architecture must do more than occupy space — it must embody the company’s identity. Nefa Architects transformed a mid-20th-century industrial building on Moscow’s Leningradsky Prospekt into the 2,300m² DKC headquarters, with lighting design by QPRO. The project preserves the raw spatial generosity of its factory bones while introducing a lighting vocabulary drawn from the client’s own product catalog — a move that turns corporate infrastructure into spatial poetry.

PRESERVING FACTORY SCALE WHILE HUMANIZING THE WORKSPACE: THE DKC LIGHTING STRATEGY
The architects faced a familiar post-industrial challenge: a mid-20th-century factory shell with generous ceiling heights and exposed infrastructure, now tasked with housing a modern engineering headquarters. Rather than conceal the building’s structural logic, Nefa Architects treated the existing concrete and steel as a spatial asset. The design strategy centered on maintaining visual cleanliness, air, and dynamism while inserting functional lighting elements that double as brand expression.

QPRO’s lighting design responds to this industrial substrate with a deliberately restrained material palette — white, gray, and red — that echoes DKC’s corporate identity. Track-mounted rotating spotlights follow the geometry of existing ducts and beams, avoiding visual ceiling clutter while allowing flexible illumination. In the double-height atrium, custom horizontal tubular luminaries’ thread through open structural elements, turning necessary infrastructure into spatial drama. The reception desk receives cold-light illumination that renders it as a “sparkling ice floe,” a calculated material contrast against the rough concrete surroundings.

SPATIAL WALKTHROUGH: FROM ATRIUM TO WORKSTATION
The Atrium as Corporate Stage: Sculpture and Scale
The rectangular double-height atrium serves as the project’s spatial and social heart. Here, the architects deploy custom horizontal tubular luminaries that pass through existing open structural elements — a gesture that respects the building’s structural honesty while introducing a rhythmic lighting layer. The fenestration strategy (placement and sizing of windows) in adjacent zones prioritizes borrowed light into deeper plan areas, reducing reliance on artificial illumination during Moscow’s daylight hours. Red sculptural interventions function at the scale of the human body, preventing the industrial volume from feeling cavernous.

WORKSTATIONS AND THE LOGIC OF LINEAR LIGHT
The open-plan workstation zone deploys linear pendant luminaires with wide optics aligned precisely to desk clusters, eliminating glare while maintaining the visual rhythm established by suspended shelving. Track spotlights along the window wall supplement ambient light for mobile workstations. Personal desk lamps provide task-level control, acknowledging that individual preference varies more than standardized ceiling grids allow. The parti (organizing principle) of the workspace is legible: light follows work, rather than work conforming to a rigid lighting grid.

SOCIAL SPACES: FROM CAFE TO CORPORATE LOUNGE
The cafe and presentation zone centers on a bold red oval table that reads as furniture-sculpture beneath a continuous red LED wash. Metal mesh chairs maintain visual permeability, ensuring the space does not visually congest the factory’s open floor plan. Meeting rooms, the gym, and the cafe share a common lighting DNA: rectangular pendant systems with wide optics that deliver uniform illumination without the institutional flatness of recessed troffers. Built-in luminaries in meeting rooms address corner darkness, a detail often neglected in pendant-only schemes.

CIRCULATION AS EXPERIENCE: CORRIDORS AND THRESHOLDS
The corridor treatment rejects the conventional white-box approach, instead using red linear wall graphics as wayfinding devices that trace circulation paths through the deep floor plate. In the sanitary area, thin suspended red cylinders provide functional sink lighting while acting as color punctuation against rough concrete walls. A darker corridor sequence introduces tonal contrast to the predominantly white plan, using glass partitions to borrow light from adjacent zones while red accent fixtures maintain chromatic continuity. The suspended cable trays remain exposed, celebrating the building’s infrastructure rather than concealing it.

WHERE INDUSTRIAL PRESERVATION MEETS DAILY FUNCTION: AN HONEST ASSESSMENT
✦ What Works Exceptionally Well
The lighting design’s integration with existing structure is genuinely intelligent. By mounting track systems on suspended cables rather than concealing ceiling infrastructure, QPRO and Nefa Architects achieve two goals simultaneously: visual openness and future flexibility. The red-white-gray palette successfully dissolves lighting hardware into the interior rather than treating it as applied decoration. The atrium’s sculptural interventions provide necessary human scale in a volume that could otherwise feel cavernous, while the transparent reception desk — illuminated with cold light to suggest a “sparkling ice floe” — demonstrates how a single material gesture can define an entire arrival experience.

✦ Practical Considerations & Limitations
The extensive use of mirrored surfaces, while effective at amplifying light and space, introduces maintenance demands in an active factory-district environment where dust and particulate matter are realities. The exposed industrial ceiling, though aesthetically coherent, offers limited acoustic absorption — a potential concern in open-plan zones with hard surfaces where conference calls and collaborative work generate significant noise. The reliance on track spotlights for general illumination in workstation areas may require more frequent adjustment than fixed systems as desk layouts evolve, placing a subtle administrative burden on facilities management.

A FACTORY REBORN: WHAT THE DKC OFFICE GETS RIGHT ABOUT CORPORATE IDENTITY IN ARCHITECTURE
The DKC office demonstrates that corporate headquarters need not default to generic glass-and-steel refinement. By treating the Bolshevik factory’s structural DNA as a design partner rather than a problem to solve, Nefa Architects and QPRO have created a workspace where the client’s own products become spatial protagonists. The result is architecture as brand manifesto — honest, developmental, and human-scaled, reflecting the corporate values DKC sought to embody.

This project is best suited for organizations with strong manufacturing or engineering identities seeking to root their workplace in physical substance rather than digital abstraction.