Alexander Belenky

The 400-meter Okhta Tower, which could dominate St. Petersburg’s skyline, is not the only architectural issue to catch public attention.

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The proposal and early approval for a new skyscraper in St. Petersburg has ignited a public response against its construction. Although this has regularly made big headlines inside and outside Russia, it is by no means the first example of collective outrage resulting from architectural decision-making.

"In Russia now we have a second wave of defense. While St. Petersburg and Moscow are the most developed, there are other areas around the country that are just beginning to stand up for their architectural and cultural heritage,” said Natalya Samover, co-ordinator of Arkhnadzor, an architectural interest group based in Moscow.

While Russia may not seem to have the busy preoccupation with the preservation of cultural monuments that is seen in some Western countries, recent years have shown that its citizens are more than capable of voicing their opinion over provocative architectural proposals.

It would be hard to have missed the Okhta Center public debate of late, all the more since the approval for the project by St. Petersburg’s governor, Valentina Matviyenko, was given in early October. On one side stands Gazprom Neft, the would-be proprietors and principal occupants of the building, now supported by the city government; on the other, an array of civil bodies and public figures that oppose the center’s erection. Furthermore, the debate has reached circles wider than just the environs of the Neva, as the UN’s cultural body, UNESCO, warned that the proposed tower could nullify St. Petersburg’s status as a World Heritage Site.

Being hard to miss seems to be just the point for those against the $2.7 billion Okhta Center: its key and most contested feature is set to be a 400-meter high skyscraper, Europe’s highest and the first in St. Petersburg. Initially announced in late 2005, it has since been dubbed ‘Gazprom City’ and is planned for the Krasnogvardeisky district, just to the east of the historical core of the city. One pre-existing problem for the project appeared to be the 100-meter height limit for new buildings in St. Petersburg, but this law and a subsequent law suit filed by protestors have not prevented the official approval process for the project from charging on.

	Alexander Belenky The Smolny Cathedral currently dominates the Okhta Center’s  construction site — a situation soon to be reversed.

“Gazprom Neft thinks it can just throw money at the city budget and get what it wants, a new headquarters, in return from St. Petersburg — like prostitution,” Samover said. Attitudes have been quickly and radically polarized on this question. Yet public opposition to the project has also been countered by apparent support for the tower. Vladimir Zamorochinsky, a Russian actor, attended a public hearing in early September, where he spoke out in favor of Gazprom Neft and the tower. The meeting was marked by beatings and arrests, the St. Petersburg Times reported, with Yelena Malysheva, from local preservationist group Okhtinskaya Duga, saying that ODTs Okhta, the corporate arm in charge of the project, used a “rent-a-crowd” tactic to demonstrate support for the Okhta Center.

The political nature of the debate was confirmed through the Yabloko Democratic Party’s participation in a huge rally in early October in front of the construction site of the Okhta Center, where thousands of protestors gathered to contest the project. Mikhail Amosov, a party member, gave a speech to the crowd and simultaneously tore up a copy of the document made by the city government authorizing the project.

Even within state-owned media, the debate has created rifts. In mid-October, television stations Channel One and Gazprom-Media’s NTV aired simultaneous, competing reports on the project, with the former giving its objections, the latter, its support. However, a further state-run company, the polling organization VTsIOM, had published figures suggesting that residential opinion in St. Petersburg is far from split fifty-fifty: less than 25 percent of people surveyed support the project, while half oppose it.

A round-table discussion on the problems associated with maintaining objects of national heritage was held at the State Duma on November 2, during which representatives from a number of organizations, including UNESCO, discussed the Okhta question. UNESCO itself requires St. Petersburg’s authorities to submit a guarantee by February 2010 that the center will not be built, or else it risks being excluded from the World Heritage Site list following the next session of the UNESCO committee in July 2010.

In late October, dozens of people attended a rally in a bid to collect signatures against the proposed demolition of an historic house in the city, proving Okhta is not the only area of controversy in St. Petersburg’s architectural realm at the moment. The house in question is a three-story, protected building, known as the Delvig house, put up in the city center during the early part of the nineteenth century. It later became the home of Anton Delvig, a local poet and close acquaintance of Alexander Pushkin, who used to visit regularly. But in the late 1980s locals had to wrestle with the city government to prevent its destruction as part of the plans for the construction of Dostoevskaya metro station and now it is again under threat of ‘reconstruction’, Pushkin House Russian Literature Institute said. The institute also wrote an open letter to Matviyenko, asking her to prevent what they described as “yet another barbaric act aiming at the destruction of St. Petersburg’s historic appearance”.

Building on past protest

Recent events in St. Petersburg, although somewhat exceptional, are not solitary examples in Russia’s history of architectural arms bearing. “Mass demonstrations all take place for different reasons,” said Boris Stuchebryukov, a Moscow-based architect. “Some people may have completely non-architectural motivation to protest against architecture or to support it; there have been many positive as well as negative outcomes in the past.”

Alexander Belenky Public debate over the Okhta tower development took place in September with tensions running high.

One such positive example, from an architect’s point-of-view, Stuchebryukov said, was the recent ruling in favor of preserving the Krimsky Val plot of the Central House of Artists in Moscow. The plan by Inteko, since early 2008, had been to build two projects, including a large housing complex on the site and, therefore, remove the Central House of Artists infrastructure that is currently in place. Following open letters from the likes of the Tretyakov Gallery’s general director, Valentin Rodinov, published in newspapers such as Kommersant, as well as protests from locals and people who used the area for recreation, the project was scrapped.

Less triumphant examples of protests are visible all around Moscow, said the Moscow Architecture Preservation Society (MAPS) in the second edition of its book ‘Moscow Heritage at Crisis Point’. One particularly biting tale, it wrote, was that of the Alexei Dushkin facade of the Detsky Mir department store, built during the 1950s. New plans for what it called the “transformation of the building into a commonplace shopping mall” have been given the go-ahead, in spite of protests led by the designer’s granddaughter since 2007.

MAPS and architects such as Stuchebryukov gave examples of even more negative and unsuccessful outcomes to campaigns for the protection of certain architectural sites in and around the Moscow region. “It is now clear that where Moscow treads, Russia follows,” MAPS explained, in terms of drastic changes to the central cityscape being replicated not just in outer areas, but in other towns too. Added to this concern, it said, was the influential view of many developers that, in the words of Leonid Kazinets, the president of the Barkli corporation, “seventy percent of the buildings in the center are of absolutely no interest”.

Moskva City is, in fact, one renowned site, currently subject to a number of re-financing complications, that met with much unsuccessful resistance, said Samover. “Experts protested in vain, while neighboring houses were dwarfed by the development. In the boom years, when things are good, people just look at their wallets,” she said, likening the development of the international business center to the Okhta scheme.

Samover described how the trend for the active and vocal defense of architectural interests in Russia had grown in the 1980s alongside general support for ecological and cultural aspects of the Soviet Union. “It was an alternative way to gain some political influence,” she said, adding that with the collapse of the Soviet Union, many people moved from that field into mainstream politics, undermining the momentum of many such initiatives throughout the 1990s. But with a resurgence in awareness of architectural protection, Samover felt Russia could aspire to countries such as Spain or the U.K., where “there is strong activity and good three-way discussion, between resident, politician and developer”.

Other parts of the Soviet Union appear to have not yet found a voice for such a cause. Tbilisi, for example, now contains an enormous, neon-lit presidential palace, while the Soviet Academy of Sciences building is about to make way for a modern-looking Kempinski hotel.

In terms of the outlook for the British-designed Okhta Center project, which is also perhaps set to have its own territorial electricity generator built, Vedomosti reported in October, the outlook seems far from certain. While many commentators seeing the overriding factor pointing to its ultimate rejection as being UNESCO, Grigory Rezvin, Kommersant’s architecture correspondent, said in September that the real obstacle would be logistical. For him, the Marinsky project and Bolshoi Theater restoration serve simply to show that “they’ll make a mess of it”. If that is the case, then many protestors might sleep a little easier.