Posts Tagged Russia
The Melnikov house and the battle for the Soviet era’s artistic soul
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on January 16, 2011
The family feuding and legal wrangles over the revolutionary architect Konstantin Melnikov's Moscow house may at last be coming to an end. And not a moment too soon…
"Architectural forms," declared the Russian architect Konstantin Melnikov, "send forth a great clamour from one century to the next, and preserve the freshness and glory of their times." Quite how much clamour he might not have predicted. The house he built for himself, more than 80 years after it was completed, is at the centre of an intense and bitter feud that pits sister against sister, cousin against cousin, and a young, dynamic, ruthless member of Russia's new rich against Melnikov's granddaughter. One of the great houses of the 20th century is at stake, and a piece of Moscow's soul.
Melnikov came from an impoverished peasant family, and learned to draw on scavenged scraps of paper, but in the decade following the 1917 revolution he became the most dazzling of the architects who tried to express in buildings the ideals of the new era. He designed workers' clubs and a garage for the fleet of Leyland buses acquired from Britain by the communist government. He designed the much-feted Russian pavilion at the 1925 International Exhibition in Paris.
By now Melnikov had become a snappy dresser, with sharp creases and turn-ups in his trousers, spats, and a homburg with a red band. His buildings were original, with wedge-shapes jutting into the air, bold cylinders and circles, and oblique lines slashing across his plans and elevations. He was an individualist: too much so for the Soviet government, who eventually banned him from practising architecture, and he was denounced by a gathering of 800 of his fellow professionals.
His house was built on a site in the fashionable Arbat district of Moscow, obtained from the authorities on the grounds that the building would be a prototype of worker housing. It was nothing of the sort, but a personal creation, made of two interlocking cylinders. Strange hexagonal windows, nearly 60 in all, pattern its walls, making the exterior enigmatic and the interior mesmeric.
Inside, the house is a series of atmospheres revealed through an upward twist of movement, from a compressed ground floor to a high, bright studio and a roof terrace. A painter's palette of colours, dusty but strong, enhance the effects: mauve in the airy living room, a yellow to make the bedroom "a place of golden dreams". Antique furniture, bought cheap by Melnikov and his wife, sits in these modernist spaces without looking incongruous. The materials of the house are basic – brick, timber and plaster – but ingeniously constructed to minimise the amount used. Its inspirations included traditional Russian churches, American grain silos, and visionary architecture from the revolutionary period in France.
It was completed in 1929, before Melnikov was 40, and would be his last building. Until his death in 1974 he remained in official disgrace, eking a living by making stoves for his neighbours, or short-lived teaching work in the provinces. That the house still exists is due to the persistence of his son Viktor, a painter, who made its preservation his life's work. Once it was threatened by physical deterioration, and then by property development: since the fall of communism hulks of lumpen speculation have risen around it, and it seemed all too likely that the house would disappear beneath another one. It was also threatened by rows, at first between Viktor and his sister. At one point a judge ruled that the house should be divided between them, a cylinder each, which would have destroyed the essence of the design.
Now the rows are between Viktor's daughters, Ekaterina and Elena. Ekaterina lives there with her husband, and is determined to carry out her father's wish, as stated in his will, that the house should be given to the state, to become a museum. Elena claims a crucial share of the house is hers. On the day of Viktor's death in 2006, two lawyers, Elena, their cousin and "three or four guards" turned up demanding Ekaterina's eviction. She is still there, but is currently fighting a legal battle over a document signed by Viktor, when blind or nearly blind, that seems to make over her share to her sister. The question is whether he knew what he was signing.
Into this row entered Sergey Gordeev, a 37-year-old businessman on whom opinions differ. A fulsome article in the New York Times called him a "white knight"; others say he has a history of what Russians call "raiding" ie "hostile takeovers of businesses and factories that are very aggressive and barely legal". Another says: "He is a very clever cat, and a very good judge of character, but he has absolutely no idea how he rubs people up the wrong way."
Gordeev says that he "just liked the house and wanted to save it, and after that in some way forget it". He developed a passion for 1920s Russian architecture, believing "that this big and very important cultural period was… in some way another revolution, brighter and more interesting than the red one, but by some reason it became unknown". He set up the Russian Avantgarde Heritage Preservation Foundation, built up an impressive archive of drawings, models and publications, and bought one of Melnikov's workers' clubs.
He also acquired a share in the house, from Viktor's nephew, and has declared his wish to open it to the public, with an associated museum exhibiting the archive. He set up the International Committee of Trustees for the Melnikov House Museum, made up of an impressive list of experts and luminaries. He hired the respected London exhibition designers, Casson Mann, to develop ideas for the exhibiting of the archives. All these ambitions are magnificent. Problems have only arisen with the way he went about achieving them.
Gordeev turned up at the house shortly after Viktor's death, and the visitation of the heavies, asking Ekaterina to sell her share. She refused. She believes that he is financing Elena's substantial legal team, so that he can then buy the latter's share. Meanwhile half the members of the International Committee have criticised him for disregarding Viktor's will. "A lot of people have been very bruised by the process," says one involved.
At the heart of it all is the conflict between two opposite but equally stubborn personalities, Gordeev and Ekaterina. She is poor, and worn down by struggle and anxiety, but resolute that the house should become a state museum. He, as the New York Times put it, is a "slim, well-built man with windswept hair and piercing blue eyes… the picture of casual wealth in his tailored grey suit and open-collared shirt".
She has more faith in the state, despite the way it treated her grandfather, than "private individuals: one day they have money, the next they go to prison". He seems to see her as a relic of the old ways, and wants the museum run by a private foundation "because the Russian state manages museums very badly". On the face of it, both have the same ultimate aim, which is the preservation of the house and its opening to the public. What divides them are the way this should be done, the viciousness of the lawsuits, and a complete absence of trust. There is also a debate about how much Viktor, whose paintings and easels are now part of the house and its history, should be represented when it becomes a museum. His will requested that it be a museum to both Konstantin and himself.
There is a tragedy here, as the brave Russian architecture of the 1920s needs all the friends it can get, and it doesn't help if they fight one another. Cheaply built, it is vulnerable to the country's climate and the rapacity of developers. One pioneer work of the period, the collective apartment block called Narkomfin, is dissolving into ruin. The only building by the artist El Lissitsky currently stands without a roof, for the third winter running. The state of the Melnikov house is not quite as parlous, but it could still fall to pieces while everybody is arguing.
Gordeev, however, says that "soon we will deliver some news which will make a great progress in the situation". Recently he donated his archive to the State Museum of Architecture with, says the museum's director, no strings attached. He says he is "discussing the idea of donating my part of the house to the museum". A beneficial spirit of altruism seems to have entered in. All that is needed, in theory, is for the house to be made over to the public benefit in a way that is transparent and well structured. It could almost be simple, except that nothing in the history of Melnikov and his house, with its intense emotional load accumulated over decades, has ever been simple.
Antonina Pirozhkova obituary
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on November 1, 2010
Russian engineer and wife of the writer Isaac Babel, whose legacy she fought to preserve
Antonina Pirozhkova, who has died aged 101, was the leading female engineer during the construction of the Moscow metro in the 1930s. But she had an even bigger role as first the wife of the writer Isaac Babel and, following his death in 1940, the custodian of his legacy.
Pirozhkova was born in the Siberian village of Krasny Yar and showed early academic ability, helping her widowed mother at the age of 14 by tutoring other children in mathematics. By the age of 21 she was a qualified engineer and two years later she moved to Moscow. She was given a job by the newly formed Metrostroi company and helped design some of the most famous "underground palaces" in the Soviet capital, including the stations Mayakovskaya, Paveletskaya, Kievskaya, Arbatskaya and Ploshchad Revolyutsii. In 1964 she published the standard Soviet engineering textbook, Tunnels and Metros.
Pirozhkova met Babel in 1932 and they formed a relationship that lasted seven years. Their daughter, Lidiya, was born in 1937. As with many Soviet couples of the era, their marriage did not depend on a formal declaration or ceremony. The Soviet authorities later recognised Pirozhkova as Babel's widow and heir.
Outwardly it was an unusual pairing: a young Siberian engineer and a bespectacled Jewish writer, who was 15 years older and already had a daughter by his first wife and a son from a relationship with the actress Tamara Kashirina. Pirozhkova was an anchor for Babel as he faced political and artistic isolation. The couple disliked the Moscow literary scene and Babel was proud of his partner's highly skilled job. He turned down invitations on her behalf: "She is a working woman; she has no time."
In 1924 Babel had been hailed by Pravda as "the rising star of our literature". Saying he had "no imagination", he chose to experience the new Soviet era at first hand, living in Odessa's gangster neighbourhood, the Moldavanka, and riding with General Semyon Budyonny's Red Cavalry in the Soviet-Polish war in 1920. This was the material for the original and phenomenally successful short-story collections Odessa Stories (1923) and Red Cavalry (1926). But by the time he met Pirozhkova, his vivid modernist style and natural nonconformism were much less welcomed and, as he himself sardonically put it, he began cultivating "the genre of silence".
As the Stalinist repression worsened, Babel characteristically tried to play by different rules. He kept up his links with his first family, in France, had an Austrian lodger and rashly attended a salon hosted by Yevgenia Yezhova, the wife of Nikolai Yezhov, head of the secret police, the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (the NKVD, which became the KGB). His luck finally ran out on the night of 15 May 1939, when he was arrested on trumped-up charges (spying for foreign powers, being a Trotskyist agent) at his dacha in Peredelkino outside Moscow. Babel and Pirozhkova were driven into the city and parted at the gates of the Lubyanka, the headquarters of the secret police.
Babel was shot on 27 January 1940, although his death was confirmed to Pirozhkova only in 1954 and the correct date was concealed from her for another 30 years. Pirozhkova was isolated, although allowed to keep her job. As an evacuee in the Black Sea region of Abkhazia with her daughter during the second world war, she ran the engineering team building the railway tunnels there.
Pirozhkova later said with regret: "From the beginning Babel frightened me and told me I shouldn't read what had not been finished. He said: 'I'll write it and then read it to you myself.' So even when something lay open and I passed the desk, I tried not to look at it." She began a campaign to reclaim a decade's worth of Babel's unpublished work, which had been confiscated during his arrest.
In 1989 the literary researcher Vitaly Shentalinsky discovered that the NKVD had seized 15 folders of manuscripts, 18 notebooks and pads, 517 letters, postcards and telegrams and 245 various loose sheets of paper from his apartment alone. They included all Babel's letters to Pirozhkova. In 1987 two officers from the Lubyanka visited her and told her that all of this had been burned. It was later suggested that this was not true.
In 1965 Pirozhkova retired to devote herself to Babel's legacy. In 1972 she oversaw the publication of the first reminiscences about him by writers such as Ilya Ehrenburg and Konstantin Paustovsky and finally (in 1990) a two-volume edition of Babel's collected works.
Pirozhkova's own memoir of her life with Babel, By His Side, was published abroad after the end of the Soviet Union, with a Russian-language edition finally coming out in uncensored form in 2001. Her reminiscences about some of the remarkable contemporaries she had known, such as the film director Sergei Eisenstein, remained unpublished at the time of her death.
In 1996, Pirozhkova emigrated to the US, where she lived with Lidiya and her grandson, Andrei, who survive her.
• Antonina Nikolayevna Pirozhkova, engineer and writer, born 1 July 1909; died 12 September 2010
The rotten state of architecture in Samara
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on October 26, 2010
The Russian city of Samara is a treasure trove of wooden, art nouveau and constructivist buildings, but it is threatened by brutal developers and corruption.
Samara: the disappearing wooden city on the Volga | feature
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on October 23, 2010
Samara is an architectural treasure trove of wooden, art nouveau and constructivist buildings. Like many Russian cities, it is threatened by brutal developers and corrupt local officials. But there are signs of a fightback…
"Half of Samara knows you're here," says a leading fixer in the city's property business. He adds, with slightly theatrical menace, that unnamed people are keeping tabs on my movements, and during my stay a mysterious yoga teacher and ex-jailbird called Bizon – bearded, like a cut-price Rasputin – keeps appearing and disappearing. It's not so very scary, except that this is an area where property politics is a serious business. In 2004 the chief architect in the next-door city of Togliatti was murdered, for getting in the way of the wrong people.
What is at stake is a city whose fragile beauty could, like the proverbial tree falling in the woods, soundlessly disappear. It is an extreme example of what is happening all over Russia, where historic cities are almost defenceless against development, corruption and obliging local governments. Most were hidden from view in Soviet times, but their heritage is the equal of better known cities in western Europe. The recent removal of Moscow's Mayor Luzhkov, under whom the capital's built fabric was ravaged, gives a glimmer of hope: Luzhkov's Moscow set a pattern which provincial cities followed and, if you were seriously optimistic, you might think that this pattern will now change.
The centre of Samara is a varied but harmonious ensemble made up of thousands of decorated wooden houses, of a unique and graceful variant of art nouveau and of brave and hopeful buildings from the early revolutionary years. The setting is magnificent, above a broad sweep in the Volga, one of the great rivers of the world. Much of it has gone already, burnt, bulldozed, blighted or left to rot. Pustular new towers erupt from the waterfront and skyline. Almost everything that's left could go too, thanks to local government that could most charitably be described as supine. With its wooden streets and waterside setting Samara could – still, just – be a Russian San Francisco. But it is heading rapidly towards being an assembly of developers' junk, like very many cities in very many parts of the world.
You probably haven't heard of Samara, even if it is the sixth largest city in Russia, and architecturally unique. This spot, more than 500 miles east and south from Moscow, doesn't impinge much on western European minds. Great battles were not fought there, although in 1941 the Russian government evacuated to Samara, which was called Kuybyshev in Soviet times. After the war it became a centre of the rocket-building industry, and a closed city. Such foreign visitors as were permitted were transported in vehicles with curtained windows. A cluster of masts still stands on the outskirts, erected to jam transmissions from the BBC World Service and Voice of America. Samara hasn't fully recovered the habit of reaching out to the world.
Samara's greatest period, about a century ago, was cut short by war and revolution, giving little time for its identity to be shaped by art and literature. For a few decades people compared its growth rate to Chicago's, and its newly wealthy merchants built lavish houses designed with bravura and skill. These include the Kurlina House, which cost three or four times the going rate for luxury houses, and the Dacha with Elephants, a landmark famous for its sculptures of the beasts, built for the artist and entrepreneur Konstantin Golovkin. He, like others of his kind, only got to enjoy his property for a few years before the communist government forced it into collective ownership.
The communists exercised a certain brutality on the city's fabric, demolishing dozens of churches and monasteries, but they also left further monuments that inspire ambivalent admiration. Constructivism, the style of the 1920s and early 30s, is exhilarating for its daring and freedom, but you catch your breath when you find that a graceful and optimistic construction is called the Dzerzhinsky Club, after the founder of the KGB. Under Stalin the official style became more conservative, but its works still have a dignity that transcends the sinister politics behind them. These include the Krasnaya Glinka Sanatorium, built for the benefit of senior party members on a high bluff upriver, now a mesmerising ruin where a Fellini would love to film.
These works – millionaires' mansions and workers' clubs – sit among courtyarded wooden houses that are the stuff of Samara. Some are richly decorated and some are more simple, but collectively they create the special atmosphere particular to timber construction. It is a kind of peacefulness to do with the fact that the building's origins, as trees, are more evident than in masonry construction, as are the signs of the handiwork done to them. A street of wooden buildings seems more intimate and warm than a stone one; it is rare to find a city the size of Samara's old town made of them. Arranged according to a grid plan laid out under Catherine the Great, they are flexible and adaptable within an overall order, while the courtyards engendered communities of the families living round them. The same flexibility means they can respond to modern needs – the Samara-born architect Vitaly Stadnikov has demonstrated how the densities of the new tower blocks could equally be achieved by renovating the courtyards.
Wooden houses are primal – you can imagine building them yourself – but they are also, with their warpings and twistings and palpable proneness to rot and fire, vulnerable. They look as if they can vanish as easily as they came. Which is exactly what is happening in Samara, where thousands of historic houses have already disappeared. Last year the conservation groups Save and Moscow Architecture Preservation Society (maps-moscow.com) published a report on the city which said that "the devastating pace of destruction and decay" threatens "to remove its identity from the face of the earth". Architecture in Samara, says the report, "has been reduced to the role of handmaiden to semi-criminal business circles."
The ministry of culture for the Samara region agrees, saying: "The lack of acknowledged value of architectural and town planning heritage, including the economic aspect, and in the end, simply a lack of responsibility, brings damage to cultural heritage no less than enemy bombing." The regional government pins the blame on the next tier down, the city government: "Samara's architectural heritage does not have a reasonable and caring boss… as long as there is no deep-rooted change in the consciousness of the city's inhabitants and primarily in the consciousness of the municipal administrators, the threat to Samara's cultural heritage will remain."
Ownership of blocks, collectivised in communist times, is now often unclear, leaving residents insecure. Sometimes developers can acquire the right to rebuild an entire block, for a few tens of thousands of dollars. Sometimes site clearance is accelerated with arson, and burnt-out wrecks dot the city. Many are owned by the local government, and are often the worst maintained.
In place of the intricate tissue of courtyards, lumpen gimcrack multi-storey blocks appear, without the slightest pretence of assimilation, and fronted by arid, gated aprons of tarmac. Buildings other than the wooden houses don't fare much better. The art nouveau works are also crumbling and subject to fires, their carvings disintegrating and disappearing. On constructivist buildings clunky plastic-framed windows have replaced the elegant originals. A very few historic buildings have been subject to something called "restoration", whereby a glutinous simulacrum of the original facade is created, behind which you find standard suspended ceilings and fluorescent lights.
In other places you might look to local government to provide protection for the historic fabric, but here it appears to be destruction's main accomplice. In 2009 the city government cut the list of 2,000 buildings thought worthy of protection by several hundred. The list is in any case secret, so the public don't know what is protected and what is not.
It's not encouraging that, following the election of the current mayor Viktor Tarkhanov in 2006, the city appointed several associates of the company SOK, which since the mid-90s has aggressively taken over several businesses, to positions of influence. According to Vasili Sergeev, on the website kompromat.ru, "several members of the group specialised in murdering for money, drug trafficking, and extortion". Sergeev reports that the deputy head of property, the head of the department of architecture, the head of the department of transport and four others had SOK links. Such people are unlikely to let some old wooden houses get in the way of their plans.
Problems are exacerbated by the division of power between local city government, and regional government, which is appointed from Moscow. Each has responsibilities for historic buildings and planning, and their frequent inability to agree creates power vacuums which developers can exploit.
I visit Aliya Chebutaryova, main state inspector of the Administration of Russian Cultural Protection Committee in the Volga Region. She is young, seems serious about her work, and loyally refuses to criticise her bosses, but her many-worded job title disguises the fact that she runs a department of one – herself – which until 2008 had seven to 10 staff.
On behalf of the regional government, she must, alone, look after the 57 historic buildings in the Samara region (of which 50 are in the city itself) that are regionally listed – that is, on the middle tier below federal monuments and above those "protected" by the city. She must inspect their condition, and report on them, after which the ministry of culture may or may not impose a list of obligations on – if they can be found – the building's owners. If the owners fail to comply the ministry can go to court and have the building given to someone else who will take better care of it. At least they can do this in theory. In practice, despite the awful condition of many such buildings, such a seizure has never happened in Samara. Part of the problem is that owners willing and able to look after them responsibly can't be found.
Chebutaryova has, in other words, an almost impossible job, which does not speak volumes for the regional government's commitment to its heritage, but the main responsibility for Samara's fabric lies with the city government. So I seek an interview with the deputy mayor Sergei Arsentyev, the politician with most responsibility for planning. He has a reputation as a hard man, yet he seems afraid of meeting the man from the Observer: my meeting with him is twice rescheduled, then cancelled. He has, I am told, an urgent call to look at a hole in a road, of which Samara has many. A little while later Arsentyev abruptly leaves his job.
So my threatening property development fixer remains the main voice of the planning and development community in Samara. "Corruption in Samara is nothing," he tells me, offering an alternative view to almost every other Samaran I meet. "Corruption only appears where there is big money, and there is no big money in Samara." The problem rather is with Russia's federal government, which should give tax breaks to owners of historic buildings, so they can afford their upkeep. He might have a point, but the prospect of slow-moving Moscow introducing this any time soon, in hard times, is almost zero. He knows this, and it's a convenient way of deflecting the issue away from the here and now.
He also gives many reasons why people will always prefer to live in new buildings. "What car do you drive? Do you like Skodas? How can you make people like Skodas if they don't want to? You can't force people to wear a pair of shoes they don't like unless you threaten to shoot them. Old buildings smell," he adds. I live in an old building and it doesn't smell, I tell him, but he doesn't want to know.
Now the struggle over Samara's heritage has crystallised round a single building, the canteen built in 1932 for the Maslennikov factory. This was idealistic in intention and design, the idea being that this culinary facility would liberate women from domestic chores. It was designed, unusually for the time, by a woman, EM Maximova. Its plan takes the form, when seen from above, of a hammer and sickle, and it was internationally famous in its day.
Its original delicacy and airiness was modified in Stalin's time and is now badly battered, but it remains underneath an extraordinary and restorable building, which would certainly be listed in Britain. For 17 years the federal ministry of culture has pressed the regional government to protect it, and is now threatening court proceedings. Despite their fine words about the importance of "cultural heritage", the regional government's minister of culture, Olga Rybakova, returns without reply letters written to her urging action, even from high levels. Meanwhile the city government has approved a somewhat ill-defined plan, proposed by SOK, to build 82,000 square metres of commercial space on the site.
The architect Vitaly Stadnikov and others have launched a campaign to save it, including protests, mass bike rides (veloden.ru/) and a techno song. It seems quixotic, but they say they are amazed by the support they have received, especially from the young. "Young people see the city is turning into a rubbish dump," says one protestor, "and losing its variety with so many monotonous buildings."
Samara now is where San Francisco was in the 1960s, when its wooden houses were threatened with comprehensive development, or Covent Garden in the 1970s. In both cases local activists defeated the developers, and eventually demonstrated the economic value of old places. The buildings that had been scheduled for demolition became desirable and valuable.
There is a chance that this could happen in Samara, but the odds against are stacked higher. Shootings were not part of the Covent Garden debate. My fixer friend, meanwhile, is baffled by the support for the old canteen building, and asserts that it must have been financed by commercial enemies of SOK. Then the menace returns. "They should shut up about the canteen," he says. "Anything could happen to it. It could burn down."
Pasternak rages against design of Moscow museum
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on September 26, 2010
Author's grandson likens plans for new museum in Borovitskaya Square to 'Central Asian regional communist party headquarters'
The grandson of the author of Dr Zhivago has savaged plans to build a museum opposite the Kremlin, saying the design resembles "a Central Asian regional communist party headquarters".
Boris Pasternak, an architect with the same name as his Nobel prize-winning grandfather, said the Kremlin, with its domes and spires, was rapidly becoming an archaism. Overscaled and awful modern buildings had sprung up around it, he said.
Work unexpectedly started last week on the long-awaited project on Borovitskaya Square. On Wednesday, Moscow's chief architect Alexander Kuzmin said the museum was needed to store objects from the Kremlin's collection of imperial treasures, and that Unesco had approved the controversial design.
Opponents say the city government has altered the Unesco-approved plan, adding a cupola and increasing the height of the building to 23.8m — almost four metres higher than agreed.
"Even the contractors say it looks like the Reichstag," said Artyom Kromov, one of a group of activists who picketed the site last week. "The project doesn't blend in at all with Moscow's historic appearance. Unesco hasn't approved it. It violates all archaeological norms."
Speaking to Russia's Kultura TV channel , Pasternak said the capital's architectural heritage was being lost. He blamed "impudent" leadership, as well as apathetic citizens and weak civil society.
Conservationists have attacked Moscow's mayor Yuri Luzhkov for replacing historic buildings with sham replicas. Recently, the Kremlin hascriticised Luzhkov on federal TV stations, leading to speculation he may soon be sacked. Luzhkov returned to Moscow today from a holiday in Austria.
Pasternak is a well-known enemy of Moscow's building frenzy. He previously described plans to develop the field opposite the house where his grandfather wrote Dr Zhivago, in Peredelkino, just outside Moscow, as "a tragedy".
Moscow’s architectural heritage is crumbling under capitalism
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on August 10, 2010
The city's avant-garde masterpieces are falling into ruin. It seems only the oligarchs' wives can save them
From the pedestrian bridge that crosses the Moskva river towards the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour you normally have a clear view of the Kremlin. But for several days last week its fairytale towers had disappeared behind an acrid grey pall. With the thermometer stuck at a record-shattering 40C and the smog hidden by smoke from the burning marshes outside the city, this was a hellish Moscow that none of its residents had ever seen before.
I was in the city to give a talk at a new school, the Strelka Institute of Architecture, Media and Design. Located just across the river from the cathedral, the Strelka occupies the garages of the former Red October chocolate factory, which until two years ago had been producing chocolate on that site since the late 19th century. The school only opened earlier this summer but already it's one of the liveliest nightspots in the city, with film screenings, clubs and a restaurant frequented by Moscow's glamorous media set. If you're thinking that this doesn't sound much like a school, then you'd have a point, but we'll address that later. In all other senses the sight of a former industrial complex being turned into a cultural hotspot is one that we've been accustomed to in Europe and the US for several decades. In Russia, however, it's a more recent phenomenon.
One reason is that the gradual switch from an industrial to a services economy didn't begin until the Yeltsin years. And it was only around the turn of the millennium that developers started to speculate on factories (the more unscrupulous ones earned the description "raiders"). The other factor in the slow speed of the post-industrial project is that the Russians appear to value new things more than old ones.
Any sightseers embarking on a tour of Moscow's avant-garde architecture from the early 20th century had better brace themselves for a catalogue of degradation. The more hallowed the building in the architectural history books, the greater its decrepitude. Take the Narkomfin building, designed by Moisei Ginzburg with Ignaty Milnis in 1928 to house the workers of the commissariat of finance. This radical apartment block, which spearheaded the idea of collective living, is one of the most important surviving constructivist buildings. And it is literally crumbling – indeed it's in such a sorry state that I was amazed to find that people still live in it. Then there is another constructivist masterpiece, Konstantin Melnikov's Rusakov workers' club of 1929, with its muscular geometric profile. It's still as dramatic as ever but empty now except for an Azerbaijani restaurant that has attached its own folksy timber entrance (with lurid neon signage) to the unforgettable facade.
But it is not just the early modernist heritage of Moscow that is unloved. Even the pride of a more recent Soviet past is going to seed. The All-Russia Exhibition Centre (VDNKh), the expo site in the north of the city that was a town-sized advertisement of Soviet achievements, is today a rather seedy theme park. None of its grandiose pavilions still contain anything worth seeing. The grandest, announced by a Tupolev rocket in the forecourt, is the 1966 Space Pavilion. It now houses a garden centre that would embarrass your average parish hall, let alone this vaulted cathedral to the Soviet space programme. Under the dome, the giant portrait of Yuri Gagarin has a sheet draped over it. I asked a local why and he answered simply: "Shame." It would dishonour the legendary cosmonaut to look out over this mess.
This is the climate in which the Russian post-industrial project is taking shape. Preservation is not a major preoccupation here, which is ironic considering that much of the post-communist architecture has been built to look old (it's known unofficially as the "Luzhkov style", after Moscow's long-serving mayor). And yet one fifth of Moscow is made up of industrial sites – think of the impact that Tate Modern had on London's cultural scene and then imagine how much potential Moscow has. But destroy-and-rebuild is the model favoured here, with over 1,000 historical buildings knocked down in the last decade. There's no pressure from heritage bodies and no incentives to convert industrial buildings. Indeed, there tend to be disincentives, such as the regulation that only new buildings can qualify for class A office status. It's no wonder that developers have been either demolishing the factories to build luxury apartment blocks or turning them into business parks.
In the last few years, however, things have started to change. For one thing, the recession has put the brakes on developers, allowing nimbler entrepreneurs to slip in. The Red October factory, for instance, was meant to be turned into a luxury residential zone called Golden Island, with buildings by Norman Foster (much beloved of Russia) and Jean Nouvel. Only the credit crunch enabled the Strelka's founders to lease their site. But there is also a new player on the Moscow property scene: the oligarch's wife, who knows only too well from the international circuit how to turn defunct industry into cultural prestige. One such is Dasha Zhukova, Roman Abramovich's wife, who two years ago turned Melnikov's temple-like Bakhmetevsky bus garage of 1927 into an art centre called Garage. Last week it was holding a Rothko retrospective, the kind of show that normally only major museums can handle.
On a grander scale, though less refined architecturally, are the cultural developments in the Kursky industrial area. Here there is Winzavod, a red-brick wine factory built in the 1860s. It was bought by Roman Trotsenko to turn into offices but again his wife, Sofia, saw the potential for a cultural centre. Today it's full of galleries, showrooms and creative studio spaces. And right next door to it is what used to be the Arma gasworks, which supplied the gas for Moscow's streetlights. Now its four brick gasometers are home to a clutch of nightclubs, creative agencies and publishing houses. In a strange hangover from Soviet bureaucracy, you have to show your passport to enter and you're not allowed to take photographs, which somehow is not quite in the spirit of the place.
Here's the question: is it to be left to the oligarchs' wives to deliver on all this potential cultural programming? One Muscovite I met referred to Garage and Vinzavod rather dismissively as "toys for rich people". "Still," he added, "they could just be buying more yachts."
Perhaps the Strelka offers a different model. The founders of this postgraduate design school, with a curriculum designed by Rem Koolhaas, are at least using their wealth to invest in the next generation. And one way that they are making the school's name (while recouping some funds) is as a social hotspot. In fact, the Strelka is the kind of hybrid that could probably only exist in the turbo-capitalist experiment of Moscow: one part ideology, one part philanthropy (the education will be free) and one part the place to be seen. If the school succeeds, then while Russia may have come late to the post-industrial party, it will have contributed something new to the rather predictable formats we know so well in Europe. Meanwhile, locals are paying it a classic Muscovite compliment: "It's so not like Moscow."
Lord Foster fires up campaign to save rusting Russian radio tower
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on April 16, 2010
Architect brands Lenin-commissioned structure as a work of 'dazzling genius' and inspiration that must be saved
From a distance it looks a bit like an upturned wastepaper basket, soaring over the concrete skyline of southern Moscow.
The Russian capital's unique Soviet-era radio station was built in 1922 to spread the message of revolutionary communism around the world, but it is badly neglected and suffering from corrosion.
Now British architect Lord Foster has backed a campaign to save the 150-metre-high steel tower designed by the engineering genius Vladimir Shukhov.
In an open letter, Lord Foster describes the tower as "a structure of dazzling brilliance and great historical importance". Calling the structure Shukhov's masterpiece, Foster says it is the "first major landmark of the Soviet period".
Made up of a delicate lattice structure, the tower has five interlocking "hyperboloids", each smaller in size, giving the impression of an inverted telescope. The revolutionary design is an inspiration for several of Foster's own landmark projects including the Gherkin, or Swiss Re building, in the City of London.
Lenin commissioned the tower to adorn his new Soviet Union during a period of romantic optimism. It was built between 1919-1922. Nearly 90 years on, it is badly neglected and suffering from corrosion.
Russia's federal and local government are locked in dispute over which one of them should pay for repairs. Neither seems willing to stump up the cash.
In the meantime, Foster says, the structure is "neglected and dying" and without "faithful restoration" is doomed to fail. Several other leading European and US architects have backed Foster's letter, sent last month to the Moscow authorities. The art critic Andrew Graham-Dixon is another fan, and rode to the top in his recent BBC series on Russian art. Dixon-Smith hailed it as "one of the great monuments of the constructivist post-revolutionary period".
Today Shukhov's grandson, also called Vladimir, said the tower near Moscow's Shabolovskaya metro station was inaccessible and closed to visitors.
The idea was to restore it and turn it into a major Moscow tourist attraction, he said. Last year Russia's prime minister, Vladimir Putin, expressed his support for the scheme, but since then nothing had happened, Shukhov said.
The steel framework had not undergone any anti-corrosion treatment for 20 years, he said, and was at risk of falling down. "We are in a very dangerous situation. There's been a lot of talk but no activity. You have the architectural equivalent of a diamond here, and yet nothing is being done to save it."
Under the headline "corroded masterpiece", Russia's Izvestiya newspaper contrasted official Russian indifference to the building's fate with Foster's vigorous campaign.
"Only foreigners care about its destiny," the paper said.
Russia's state TV and radio station – which owns the tower – had no money and even less desire to save it, the paper added.
Shukhov was one of the greatest structural engineers of the early 20th century and the leading engineer of his era in Russia.
He pioneered the use of new structural systems, creating hyperboloid structures of double curvature whose lightness and geometric complexity defy the imagination, even in the computer age. He also built Russia's first oil pipeline as well as numerous railway bridges.
Demolition ball threatens Moscow artists’ colony
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on February 16, 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.
Luke Harding on Moscow’s plan to demolish artists’ village
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on February 16, 2010
Luke Harding on Moscow's plan to demolish artists' village
David Sarkisyan obituary
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on February 5, 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