David Sarkisyan, the inspirational director of the Shchusev architecture museum who passionately campaigned to preserve the city’s architectural heritage has died. He was 62.
Sarkisyan, who turned a dying museum into one of the city’s best cultural centers, was at the heart of the Moscow preservation movement, an outspoken opponent of what he called the city’s barbaric treatment of its heritage. He died Jan. 7 in Munich.
Born in Yerevan, Sarkisyan had many careers, or “four lives” as he called it, from his days studying physiology to work as a pharmacist — where he came up with a drug used to fight Alzheimer’s disease — to life in Paris where he directed films and once walked down the red carpet at the Cannes Film Festival with French film star Jeanne Moreau.
His last career change came in 2000, when he was surprisingly named head of the Shchusev architecture museum, on Ulitsa Volkhonka. Hugely energetic and charismatic, vastly knowledgeable and seeming to know everyone, Sarkisyan revitalized the museum.
“It is a colossal loss for all of Russian architecture,” architect Yevgeny Asse said. “It was David who when he was director of the architecture museum made his museum into one of modern art, bringing new people there, young people, making architecture a cultural event on a national scale.”
Anyone visiting the museum would not forget Sarkisyan’s office, where guests would visit day and night. He sat behind a desk that along with almost every other surface in the room was piled high with books, photos and a million other objects.
“It was the interior of a magician,” Kommersant’s architectural critic Grigory Revzin wrote in a tribute to Sarkisyan on Monday. “All these foreigners told each other that there were a number of sights in Moscow: the Mausoleum, St. Basil’s cathedral and David Sarkisyan’s office. There were hundreds of things there, things which were impossible to be there.”
When destruction came to the museum’s doorsteps with the demolition of Voentorg, the military department store opposite, Sarkisyan organized a petition in protest that was signed by thousands and can be seen on the museum’s web site, Muar.ru.
He ensured that some of the valuable interiors in the Hotel Moskva were removed and given to the museum. One of his last requests was to try and save some of the interior of Detsky Mir, the children’s department store that is currently being gutted in a controversial reconstruction.
“I am exceptionally lucky as a person,” Sarkisyan said in an interview with The Moscow Times in 2005, “because despite having four professions I have never ‘worked.’ My wage was always small, but I only did things that I liked. I am one of the happiest people in the world.”