[A-List] Russia: Luzhkov the visionary?

["Michael Keaney" <michael011@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

The architect's ego is reconstructed as Moscow's mayor asserts the lay
view

London has a lot to learn from a city that has not sold out to money and
vulgarity and remains recognisably Russian

Simon Jenkins
Friday April 27, 2007
The Guardian

The funeral of Boris Yeltsin was remarkable not just for when it
occurred, defying all medical forecasts, but for where. The magnificent
white towers and onion domes of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour
stand high on the banks of the Moscow river upstream of the Kremlin,
originally built to commemorate Napoleon's retreat from Moscow. Yeltsin
was the first Russian leader to be celebrated here since Tsar Alexander
III in 1894, one reason being that the cathedral ceased to exist after
being blown up by Stalin in 1933 and replaced by a swimming pool.
Rebuilt by Yeltsin in 1997 it is, in the minds of Russians, the same
cathedral. It would not be so in Britain, and thereby hangs a tale.

Yeltsin and now Vladimir Putin presided from their adjacent Kremlin
palace over a remarkable transformation. The entry to Red Square is now
guarded by the twin towers of the 16th century Resurrection Gate, with
its shrine to the Iberian virgin, kissed by ancient visitors to the
city. They were razed by Stalin to get his tanks and missiles into the
square. Rebuilt they restore a sense of medieval enclosure and drama to
the square's approach, as if the Holbein Gate had been re-erected across
Whitehall. Next door is the strawberry-coloured Kazan Cathedral,
replaced by Stalin with a public lavatory. It was rebuilt in 1993 to
plans made secretly by the architect charged with its destruction.

Across Moscow dozens of churches and monasteries wiped out by Stalin
have been rebuilt facsimile. Brutalist boxes and towers such as the
Rossiya and Intourist hotels have been demolished, the latter replaced
by a facsimile of an old tsarist palace. The mayor of Moscow for the
last 15 years, Yuri Luzhkov, wants Moscow architecture of all periods to
grace his city. The Stalinist/art deco Moskva Hotel next to the Kremlin
is being rebuilt as a copy, at least outside. The neo-Gothic ministries,
the decrepit facades of the old Chinese quarter next to Red Square and
the once grim facade of the Lubyanka have been restored and carefully
lit.

Lord Foster was curiously commissioned to rebuild the Rossiya site on
the former grid of low-rise streets and courtyards, hardly his forte.
When he presented his usual glass boxes 10 storeys high, Luzhkov
retorted that "this is not Moscow" and told him to try again, something
his lordship is not in the habit of hearing. Foster's new plan comprises
a crisscross of streets and blocks, still bland and uniform, but
doubtless this too will change. The evolution of this exciting site
under the walls of the Kremlin will be a true test of whether Foster is
an architect of cities, rather than of monuments.

This frenetic activity - Luzhkov has only until he retires next year to
create his new Moscow - comes at a price. His wife is a developer, and
ominously owner of Moscow's cement monopoly. The outskirts of Moscow are
an architectural disaster area, while even restorations do not respect
normal standards of conservation. Backhanders talk. Some 400 of the
city's registered historic buildings have been destroyed since the fall
of communism, its poverty a great conservationist.

The Luzhkov style of romantic historicism is derided by western critics.
To the Times's Marcus Binney it wavers from "ersatz replica to bloated
postmodernism". To the New York Times it is pastiche "theme park
Russia". The guidebooks refer to kitsch and Disneyland. Yet they do not
deride the reproduction Palladian mansions of the tsarist suburb of
Arbatz, let alone the Gothic cathedrals of Europe, almost all of them in
whole or part 19th century. Are the post-Reformation north and west
fronts of Westminster Abbey "pastiches"?

Some of this criticism is valid. Luzhkov's activities are about to be
damned in a devastating report by the valiant Moscow Architectural
Preservation Society, cataloguing the loss not just of major monuments
under his regime but of hundreds of courtyards, terraces and quaysides.
The mayor is said to have staged nothing less than "an assault on the
dense and delicate fabric" of Moscow, a far more interesting city
architecturally than St Petersburg.

Less worthy of criticism is the Moscow that Luzhkov has struggled to
create. He at least cares, and thank goodness he is a man in a hurry,
given what may follow him. The pressure to mimic Ken Livingstone in
London and seek a pastiche Manhattan to enrich the oligarchs must have
been strong. The result would have been the "edifice egotism" that is
now pepper-potting the London skyline, and turned post-reunification
Berlin into a joyless architectural gallery.

Luzhkov's architecture council meetings, conducted in public, reflect a
stylistic self-confidence not seen in European cities since Victorian
Britain, a culling of the language of the past to enhance and glorify
the present. This past is to Russians not the foreign country so feared
by British planners. It is a vivid component of the present, from which
war, ideology, religion, wealth and poverty cannot be eliminated. It
seeks a Moscow that is recognisably Russian, tsarist, Stalinist as well
as modern, in appearance as well as in spirit. Those who want modernity
can find it aplenty in Moscow's rampant commercialism, in its garish
neon billboards, its bombastic street furniture and its helpless
traffic, created by too much parking. But I prefer even this to the
obliteration of all that is old in Beijing to pander to the pretensions
of the International Olympic Committee.

British critics may insult the outcome, though I sense that if the
British people were asked, they would embrace Luzhkov's vision rather
than Livingstone's. The campaign to rebuild the prime monument to the
railway age, Euston Arch, in the new Euston has been ridiculed by the
authorities. Any suggestion to recreate the facades of Nash's Regent
Street or Adam's Portland Place would be laughed out of court. News
International's Wapping printworks, replacing the finest set of
18th-century warehouses not just in Britain but in Europe, are shortly
to be vacated. Luzhkov would rebuild the old London Docks - and highly
profitable they would be. Tower Hamlets, or any London council, would
not have the guts.

It is London, not Moscow, that has sold out architecturally to money and
vulgarity. We can save the old and declare it "authentic", as we did
Piccadilly Circus, St Pancras and Covent Garden. But when we destroy the
old, as at Spitalfields or along the Thames, we do not insist on
replacements evocative of their history or location. Modern architects
recognise no obligation to the city and its history. They want only to
make personal "statements". Like lawyers and doctors, they regard it as
their professional right to dictate the framework in which they operate.
Political interference is insufferable. If that means brain-dead glass
boxes from some American computer programme, too bad.

For all his corruption and disregard for conservation, Luzhkov has
asserted the dominance of a lay view in determining how a modern city
might look, and done so with bravura, style and a sense of place. One
day London will treat its banal glass boxes as their creators have
treated the banal concrete slabs they are mostly replacing. I suspect
that Luzhkov's Moscow will be regarded with greater affection and
respect by its citizens. 


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