Luke Harding on Moscow’s plan to demolish artists’ village
February 8th, 2010
Demolition ball threatens Moscow artists’ colony
February 8th, 2010
Fury as mayor targets one of last green enclaves
It is one of Moscow's last green enclaves, a unique garden village built by the new Soviet Union for its revolutionary elite. In winter and summer, weary Muscovites flock here to escape the urban noise and to wander along peaceful avenues of birch trees and log-built cottages. You can even spot the odd woodpecker.
But the artists' colony in Moscow's Sokol district, founded in 1923 as a pioneering experiment in cooperative living, is now under threat. Three weeks after Moscow's mayor, Yury Luzhkov, declared war on residents in another suburb – the riverside area of Rechnik – he has indicated that Sokol village and its bohemian denizens are next up for the wrecking ball.
Luzhkov's decision to leave Rechnik's residents homeless has provoked a media storm, dominating Russian television news and radio talkshows. The latest attack on Sokol is front-page news in the papers, with Komsomolskaya Pravda asking: "Why has a demolition epidemic broken out?"
Since becoming mayor in 1992, Luzhkov has presided over the destruction of much of historic Moscow. Critics suggest that the flattening of Sokol's artists colony would be the crowning act in a long career of cultural vandalism. Officials insist that the mayor is simply taking drastic measures against rampant illegal development.
Oleg Mitvol, the head of Moscow's northern administrative district, told the Guardian he plans to demolish 30 of the village's 113 cottages. Mitvol claimed that the owners had knocked down the original properties, often replacing them with monstrously oversized bungalows. "You wouldn't allow this in London," he said.
Bulldozers have already arrived in the western suburb of Rechnik, which the city administration says was built illegally. Since last month, more than 20 houses have been controversially demolished, with their owners, including war veterans and wealthy businessmen, turfed out into the snow. In one garden, wrecking crews found a pet leopard.
Illegal development is rife across Moscow, however, and sceptics have queried Luzhkov's new and apparently selective enthusiasm for enforcing the law. Sokol's residents say they suspect the mayor plans to flatten the village and replace it with something else. "This is a beautiful place. Why he wants to demolish it is a mystery," said Nina Pavlovna, 78, standing in front a rustic green-painted dacha.
For more than 80 years the colony has been home to painters, sculptors and thinkers – and, more recently, the Guardian's Moscow correspondent. It was Lenin who came up with the idea of garden villages to adorn his expanding Bolshevik state. The architect Alexei Shchusev, who designed Lenin's tomb, mapped out the overall plan.
Sokol's roads are named after some of Russia's most famous artists, among them Isaac Levitan, Ivan Shishkin and KarlBriullov. Visitors have included Dmitry Shostakovich, Yuri Gagarin and Le Corbusier. Corbusier liked it so much he built a house here. Even the trees have been carefully selected: limes, birches and red sugar maples radiate from a central point to create the illusion of rural space.
The village shrugged off a previous threat to its existence in Soviet times. More recently and ominously, wealthy Russians have replaced many of the original log cabins with showy concrete palaces. In 2008, the Moscow Architecture Preservation Society warned that Sokol's "single plots" were being transformed into "grotesquely over-dimensioned and pretentious fortress-like bungalows".
Igor Tochkin, head of the Sokol village council, said today that all of the owners who had demolished their original properties and built new ones had done so with the permission of the authorities. "They've got all the documents," he said. Tochkin, who was born in the village in 1937 and has lived there ever since, said he was mystified as to why Mitvol wanted to knock the buildings down.
Mitvol does not deny that some city hall officials may have taken bribes in return for allowing construction. He said today that papers would now be sent to Moscow's prosecutor. He would ask the court to level the offending properties. "My job is to restore order. I'm carrying out my work in the hope that Russia becomes a law-based state," he declared. "I couldn't do this without Luzhkov's support."
Back in the village, several ladies walked their dogs past an English brick cottage festooned with rapier-like icicles. A couple of kids were whizzing down a slide in the playground next to the simple war memorial. "This is a fairy-tale place. We need to preserve it," Pavlovna said.
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Anshen & Allen cancer centre opens
February 8th, 2010
An £80 million cancer centre designed by Anshen & Allen has opened on London’ Harley Street.
Lend Lease boss to chair UK Green Building Council
February 8th, 2010
The chief executive of developer Lend Lease’s European arm Lend Lease has been appointed chairman of the UK Green Building Council.
Take the next exit for the green motorway service station
February 8th, 2010
A new motorway service station being designed in the Cotswolds will lead the way environmentally
Motorway services and green design are awkward bedfellows. It's not simply the petrol, the shopping and the fast food, but service stations take up a lot of space. And of course, they're dispiriting to look at.
But the challenge of building new services in the Cotswolds between junctions 11 and 12 of the M5 persuaded the developers to hold a competition. It was won by Glenn Howells, whose Savill Building in Windsor Park was shortlisted for the Stirling prize three years ago.
Designed to "knit" into the landscape so that even the petrol station cannot be seen from the road, it will emit a fifth of the carbon dioxide of normal motorway services thanks to a kitchen garden, the creation of habitats for wildlife, and the use of locally sourced Douglas fir as the building material.
The consortium, whose planning application is to be considered by Stroud district council, includes Westmorland, the family-run firm behind the much-admired Tebay services in Cumbria, which won Egon Ronay's British Academy of Gastronomes' Grand Prix award last year.
The trouble is, having arrived you might never want to leave. The architect describes it as "a rural oasis", but it's not just the peace and quiet that is so appealing. It's the homemade food, the fresh veg and organic meat that will be sold in the farm shop, and the locally produced art and crafts replacing Marks & Spencer, WH Smith and other brands that will be banned, while profits will be ploughed back into the local community.
Green and foodie credentials aside, it's the design that will put it on the architectural map. The undulating shapes echo the landscape, while the timber-clad interior looks like the business- class lounge of a Scandinavian airport, with curvy chairs, low coffee tables and subtle lighting. Bring on the organic apple juice, the carrot cake and the hand-thrown pottery.
Amanda Baillieu is the editor of Building Design.
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‘Stonehenge? It’s more like a city garden’
February 7th, 2010
Design watchdog hits out at plans for £20m visitor centre at megalithic jewel in England's cultural crown
Its footpaths are "tortuous", the roof likely to "channel wind and rain" and its myriad columns – meant to evoke a forest – are incongruous with the vast landscape surrounding it.
So says the government's design watchdog over plans for a controversial £20m visitor centre at Stonehenge, the megalithic jewel in England's cultural crown. CABE, the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment, has criticised the design of the proposed centre, claiming the futuristic building by Denton Corker Marshall does little to enhance the 5,000-year-old standing stones which attract more than 800,000 visitors each year.
Its concerns are the latest chapter in the long saga surrounding the English Heritage-backed project, and follow a government decision two years ago to scrap on cost grounds a highly ambitious £65m scheme to build a tunnel to reroute traffic to protect the World Heritage site.
The centre, which has been approved by Wiltshire county council planners, has divided opinion.
"We question whether, in this landscape of scale and huge horizons and with a very robust end point that has stood for centuries and centuries, this is the right design approach?" said Diane Haigh, CABE's director of design review.
"You need to feel you are approaching Stonehenge. You want the sense you are walking over Salisbury Plain towards the stones."
But the "twee little winding paths" were "more appropriate for an urban garden" than the "big scale open air setting the stones have", she added.
The many columns were meant to be "lots of trunks" holding up a "very delicate roof", she said. "Is this the best approach on what is actually a very exposed site. In particular, if it's a windy, rainy day, as it is quite often out there, it's not going to give you shelter. We are concerned it's very stylish nature will make it feel a bit dated in time, unlike the stones which have stood the test of time".
CABE believed the location of the centre, at Airman's Corner, is good, and were pleased "something was happening at last", but questioned the "architectural approach". The centre has the full support of local architects on the Wiltshire Design Forum, and has been passed by the local planning committee. Nevertheless English Heritage recognised it was an emotional and divisive subject.
"Innovative architectural designs will always polarise opinion, and often nowhere more so that within the architectural world itself," it said in a statement.
"The Stonehenge project has to overcome a unique set of challenges," it said. "This has required a pragmatic approach and, following widespread consultation, we maintain the current plans offer the best solution".
Stephen Quinlan, partner at Denton Corker Marshall, defended the design. The roof was meant to be a "sun canopy" and not offer weather protection in what was, principally "an outdoor experience".
"It's not an iconic masterpiece. It's a facility to help you appreciate the Stonehenge landscape. It's intellectually deferential in a big, big way to Stonehenge as a monument.
"I wouldn't even mind if you couldn't remember what the building looked like when you left. The visitor centre is not the destination," Quinlan said.
However, he added: "We don't take criticism from CABE lightly. And we are crawling through their comments to see if there are any improvements we can make."
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Design Museum Holon | Architecture
February 7th, 2010
Ron Arad has finally got round to making a building – Design Museum Holon, in his native Israel – and it is a remarkable success, writes Deyan Sudjic
Thirty one years after Ron Arad walked out of the architect's studio in Hampstead where he had just set about learning the finer points of professional practice to go for lunch, and decided never to go back, he has finally completed an authentic piece of architecture. He has done the occasional interior; in Belgium he worked on a shopping centre with a roof like a lava flow; there is his own studio in London; and an unbuilt house, that was blocked by hostile neighbours. But nothing like Design Museum Holon, just outside Tel Aviv, which is ambitious, and highly visible.
Unsurprisingly there was a certain nervousness at the opening on Monday. Successful designers who try their hands at making buildings have a way of coming badly unstuck. The scale is different, the relationship with space is different, and the materials are different. Would Arad, who has managed a remarkably creative twin-track career continually moving back and forth between mass production and one-offs, finally fall off the tightrope he has walked for so long in front of a home crowd in his native Israel?
The museum manages, intriguingly, to be both rational and a bravura piece of architecture. The first thing that it has to do is hold its own in an unforgiving context of the concrete slabs that typify much contemporary building in Israel. But equally important, if it is to fulfil the ambition of Holon's mayor to make his city a centre for design, it has to work as a place for an exhibition programme.
Arad has convincingly managed to do both, by creating what amounts to two distinct buildings. One is an inventive, intricate piece of sculpture, the other a logical and lucid set of gallery spaces, with one locked in the other like a Möbius strip. From the outside you see a tightly woven, sand-coloured dune of twisted steel ribbons. Once caught up in the whirling outer vortex, you find yourself in a protected inner courtyard, open to the strong Mediterranean sunshine that in turn leads into the galleries. There are two, both of them rectangular, and handsomely proportioned, with the larger of them toplit with natural light, filtered through carefully profiled concrete blades inside.
This is too carefully controlled a piece of architecture to be reduced to the banal status of an icon. It works hard to do what is needed, but then perhaps that should not come as a surprise: designers know better than most the frustration of exhibition spaces in which overassertive architecture attempts to upstage content.
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Government pledges £3m to complete Cutty Sark restoration
February 5th, 2010
The restoration of historic clipper the Cutty Sark has been secured after the Department of Culture Media & Sport announced this week it would commit £3 million to the project.
David Sarkisyan obituary
February 5th, 2010
Museum director whose bold leadership made him a key figure in Russian architecture
David Sarkisyan, who has died of cancer aged 62, was the charismatic director of the Russian State Museum of Architecture (MUAR). By using its resources for explorations of the past and present, he became one of the most significant figures on the Russian architectural scene.
A repository for hundreds of thousands of drawings, photographs and artefacts, the museum was founded in 1934, and until 2002 was known as the Shchusev State Museum of Architecture, after Aleksei Shchusev, the architect of, among other buildings, the Lenin Mausoleum. In the post-communist era, major changes took place at the museum. First, a collection of 364 old master drawings looted in Bremen in 1945 by Viktor Baldin, the museum's head for 25 years, was brought to light amid great controversy. Then, the MUAR's massive archive was relocated from the suburban Donskoy monastery into the main museum premises in central Moscow where, in dire conditions because of a severe lack of funds, they continue to be kept.
Sarkisyan was appointed as director of the MUAR at the turn of the millennium. In its main galleries in the 18th-century Talyzin mansion on Vozdvizhenka Street, he presented Russia's architectural history, with particular emphasis on the avant-garde movements of the 1920s and 30s. When lack of funds prevented the restoration of a dilapidated part of these premises, Sarkisyan made a virtue out of its ruinous condition. Unheated, windowless and using rough-sawn boards laid as a walkway across the exposed brick vaults, the appropriately named temporary exhibition space Ruina (The Ruins) was opened by Sarkisyan in freezing winter weather as a temporary exhibition space. It quickly became one of the most sought-after spaces in Moscow, hosting fascinating, edgy exhibitions visited by audiences wrapped in their overcoats.
In 2005, Sarkisyan also involved the MUAR in the First Biennale of Contemporary Art in Moscow, and developed a series of exhibitions introducing Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas and other contemporary architects to the Russian public, thanks to shrewd alliances with western institutions such as Vienna's Museum of Applied Arts. In 2002, he was responsible for the Russian contribution to the Venice Architectural Biennale and, two years later, he curated the Moscow-Berlin 1950-2000 show.
Sarkisyan's flamboyant yet deeply committed leadership established the MUAR as a thriving centre for exhibitions and public events and ensured dedicated, high-profile advocacy for the preservation of historic architecture in Russia. With a group of fledgling preservationist associations active in efforts to protect Moscow's heritage, Sarkisyan led campaigns against the demolition of the 1960s hotels Intourist and Rossia, the Voentorg department store, and the gutting of the Detsky Mir store.
He was one of the main forces pushing for the restoration of Moisei Ginzburg's Narkomfin House, a landmark of constructivism which remains in a dire condition. Sarkisyan also adamantly opposed the erection of the Gazprom tower in St Petersburg.
His death is likely to have a significant impact on the fate of another modernist masterpiece, the house that the architect Konstantin Melnikov built for himself in Moscow in 1929. Sarkisyan was a passionate supporter of one of Melnikov's granddaughters in her fight against the oligarch Sergei Gordeev's project to create a private foundation in charge of the house and its collections, and, together with many intellectuals and architects, proposed that the house should be the focus of a state museum devoted to this unique building and the career of its architect.
Sarkisyan's outspoken criticism of the fate of buildings of historic significance in Moscow – from the demolition of the hotel Moskva, which was replaced by a wan copy camouflaging a new structure, to the insertion of a spurious historical fake within the uncompleted shell of the 18th-century Tsaritsyno palace – made him no friends within the municipality. An outspoken critic of the mayor Yuri Luzhkov's decisions concerning the fate of the city's built heritage, Sarkisyan had biting words to use against the transformation of Moscow into "a symbiosis of Disneyland, Las Vegas and a Turkish resort". It is reported that his burial in the Armenian cemetery of Moscow was barred by city officials, a clear indication that Sarkisyan's views could still upset the bureaucracy, even from beyond the grave.
Born in Yerevan, Armenia, Sarkisyan studied biology and human physiology at Moscow State University. His first career, in pharmacology, produced innovative treatments for Alzheimer's disease. He then moved on to the world of cinema, shooting close to 20 documentaries, including the acclaimed Comrade Kollontai and Her Lovers (1996). In 1991, he was first assistant director during the filming of Yuri Klimenko and Rustam Khamdamov's Anna Karamazoff, starring Jeanne Moreau. The end of that year saw the collapse of the Soviet Union. He then wrote film criticism for several Russian newspapers and, in 1994, founded the Nashchokin's House gallery in Moscow.
A visit to Sarkisyan in his office at the MUAR was an exotic experience. A dark grotto, filled beyond capacity with posters, movie memorabilia, piled-up books, Stalinist kitsch, children's toys, and works of art of all kinds, it hosted vibrant and frequently uproarious meetings of leading intellectuals and architects. Frequently sleeping on the premises, the director would often greet his guests in his pyjamas.
Sarkisyan was a brilliant museum director, an exceptional cultural entrepreneur, a gifted curator and a committed defender of true and just causes, fighting a desperate rearguard action for the preservation and professional restoration of many historical landmarks from both pre-revolutionary and Soviet times. The expression of feeling prompted by his death could prove to be a turning point in the public awareness of Russia's most creative recent past.
Sarkisyan had married a fellow student while at university. They were divorced in the 1990s.
• David Ashotovich Sarkisyan, pharmacologist, film-maker and architectural conservationist, born 23 September 1947; died 7 January 2010
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Letters: Blowing the whistle on bad house design
February 5th, 2010
Lynsey Hanley is right to draw attention to the lamentable standard of new housing funded by a massive injection of public cash through the Kickstart programme (Comment, 3 February). However, she is wrong to suggest the whistle has been blown by the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment. In fact, it was a freedom of information request by Building Design's news desk that uncovered the scandal that 27 of the 136 projects handed £360m by the government scored five or less out of 20 under the industry's Building for Life standard, with two scoring only 1.5.
Despite being the government's design watchdog, Cabe has been very unwilling to help us in our investigation for fear – we believe – of annoying its fellow quango, the Homes and Communities Agency, which pays Cabe for its advice. Hanley is also surprised that "design champions" like Design for Homes have not been more critical of the low standards. However, she should be aware that Design for Homes, despite its name, is partly funded by volume housebuilders, who are the real villains of the piece.
Amanda Baillieu
Editor, Building Design
• Too many houses are built with little thought for decent open space provision, whether for playing, growing food or simply to provide respite from oceans of tarmac. Can the government really not make the connection between poor living environments and increases in poor health and social deprivation? We are demolishing 1960s housing estates and yet, by continuing to provide housing with poorly designed and managed open space, we are simply repeating the mistakes of the past. Rather than ticking boxes, we must invest in good design.
Jo Watkins
President-elect, Landscape Institute
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