History and event

The reconstructions of the Mariinski and the Bolshoy theatres are the most important cultural projects taking place in today Russia. The two projects involve a lot of meanings and associations that have more to do with architecture or culture in general than with theatre in particular. In these two projects we see two opposite approaches.

The Bolshoy is to be reconstructed like that no one will even notice it happening, since only thus can we preserve for posterity this sacred object of Russian culture. Ideally, when reconstruction finishes what we will have will be exactly what we had before it started.

Everyone in Moscow is so used to these conservation requirements that the element of nonsense contained in them goes unnoticed. In the 1990s Moscow experienced a construction boom whose entire ideology was based on the principle that there should be no difference between what was being built at the moment and what had been built in the past. We rebuilt the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour and the walls of the Kitay-gorod, structures that had been destroyed under the Soviet regime. Meanwhile, according to the official state policy, every new edifice built during the 1990s had to reproduce prototypes of the 19th-century Classicism and Eclecticism or the 20th-century Modern Style or Neoclassicism. Hundred of such houses were erected. Nowhere else in the world did a architecture inspired by the ideas of Postmodernism have official support.

This policy was, above all, the position of state and society, a strategy carried out by the democratically elected politicians. Of course, it is a result of the painful trauma inflicted by Communism. Russia had so whole-heartedly destroyed its cities to respond the idea about a new revolutionary country that now it is just as whole-heartedly rebuilding images of the destroyed. These days all attempts to alter a building's historical appearance are regarded as sacrilege.

The Bolshoy Theatre is perhaps the most vivid, most demonstrative expression of the absurdity of these ideas - for nowhere else like there they conflict so tragically with function. Here we come face to face with a situation where a policy destined to preserve a theatre in reality threatens to destroy it. The Bolshoy will be preserved as a monument, but as a result it will lose its ability to function as a modern theatrical organism.

Buildings that imitate 19th- and 20th-century Russian architecture please the politicians who commission them, but are desperately opposed by architects themselves. Everywhere it is the complaint of the Russian architectural community that they are forced to build in the obsolescent style of Postmodernism while what they actually want to do is to develop Neomodernism and Deconstructivism. Their ideal is an integration with the world of modern thoroughgoing architecture of the West - architecture as feature, show, portal into virtual reality. And this desire is all the stronger so for being rooted also in the wounds left by Communism - in, on the one hand, the challenge of the Russian Constructivism, which was just such a break-through into the Avant-Garde, and, on the other, in the barbarous destruction of this Communist architecture by the very same Communist authorities.

Eric Moss's project for the Mariinski is compensation for these suppressed desires. Combining in fantastic manner the world of high technology with radical Avant-Gardism, Moss's virtual images resurrect the spirit of Constructivism and bring Russia in the modern Western architectural scene. In effect, this project could become a remedy for the traumas suffered under Communism, but at the moment it seems an overly drastic medicine.

The two theatres are the foci for two different systems in which different social contexts are matched by differences of architectural concepts. The Bolshoy Theatre is being reconstructed impersonally, so to speak. Commissioned by the Ministry of Culture and Gosstroy (the state structure responsible for construction in Russia), the original project has become lost behind an infinite tangle of specialist's assessments, approvals, and collective decisions, so that today it would be impossible to designate a guiding will behind it. The reconstruction of the Mariinski, on the other hand, is propelled by what is for Russia a unique commission. In spite of the fact that officially the theatre is yet another state structure, at the centre of the reconstruction’s process stands the charismatic artist Valery Gergiev, who is determined to find architecture to match the top-level of his own music. The comission determined by the desire of an event or art-gesture. While the Bolshoy is being reconstructed in such a way as to avoid anything happen, Gergiev is eager for an event of colossal force.

However, amongst all this neat self-tuning system of oppositions there are figures who do not seems to be so opposed to each other. Or rather, they appear to be turncoats. These are the architects.

Leading the Foreign Legion

Since the time of Le Corbusier there has been no public building of any importance built in Russia by an alien. Moreover, since the end of the 19th century no foreign star has been invited to create an expressive art-gesture in Russia. In this sense Eric Moss finds himself on the virgin territory of xenophobia: you could say that no foreign foot has left its print on Russian architectural practice for the last 70 years. In all probability foreign feet will be kept from our shores from now onwards. Moss's project has provoked intense debate. And yet a chance to realise these projects nevertheless remains.

Here we should note that Moss is just the first of an entire cohort of foreign stars who have visited Russia this year. Rem Koolhas was invited to reconstruct the General Staff Building for the new Hermitage/Guggenheim museum; Herzog and de Meron - to design a “Village of Luxury” in the suburbs of Moscow; Renzo Piano - to build a skyscraper in Moscow's City. However, in none of these cases has the matter gone so far as a start of actual designer`s work. Eric Moss's project - thanks to the generous support given to it by the American investors Frederick and Laurie Smith - is the most real of all these proposals. But what is most important, Russia has at last taken an interest in major names from the West, and the interest has been taken not by individual Russian architects (for whom the work of their western colleagues has long since been the main criterion for estimation of their own work), but by state authorities, politicians, and those actually responsible for signing contracts. What do they want from the Western star architects? What is lacking in Russia itself.
During the 1990s the system by which major projects were carried out here has remained essentially the same what it had been in the Soviet epoch. It involved large design institutes, a vast number of approvals, minimal private initiative and maximum pressure on architects from clients, subcontractors and builders. In the case of large projects executed in Moscow in the 1990s, as with medieval buildings, it is often impossible to identify an author. Accordingly, as a result comes into being an architecture that belongs to no one in particular and 'satisfies' all. It is grey, humdrum, and capable of attracting neither people nor money. What we need from the West today is the tried and tested, economically proven system of the architectural art gesture, i.e. a star with a world name, a design from the realm of fantasy, constant attention from the public during constructing, and, as a result, guaranteed success. In other words, we need architecture as spectacle, as show. And since we ourselves have forgotten how to product a show, we have no choice but to invite stars from abroad.
Eric Moss would seem to fit the part ideally. His projects explode Saint-Petersburg indeed. They will redirect pedestrian flows, change the structure of the urban environment, and turn the territory around the Mariinski Theatre and the New Holland into a fantastic show.

But when you look more closely at his project, what you will find is not a spectacle at all. The centric installation of Moss's New Mariinski, austerely framed by two rectangular blocks and full of internal energy, reminds of a certain sanctuary or a temple of some unknown religion. In spite of the principles of Deconstruction, Moss does not deconstruct anything here. His design has no extensive development; on the contrary, it takes architectural matter and, so to speak, presses it in such a way as to create in its centre a point of maximum concentration. At the presentations of his project, whether in the Mariinski Theatre or at the World Architectural Congress in Berlin, Moss corroborates his ideas with quotations from Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Isaiah Berlin (not showmen, it should be noted). In his design he tries to express certain ancient forces, hidden energies that are held in check by St Petersburg's Classical grid. He is aware of a direct link with the architecture of Russian Constructivism. And, finally, he feels he is an emissary of the 20th-century Avant-Garde, the movement which sprang up - among other places - in Russia but was then forced to leave the country because of political circumstances.

So we are witnesses to a certain substitution. The man we’ve invited to put on a show turns out to be a fundamentalist who brings to light the hidden strata of the culture in which he has found himself. Far from producting a show, what he attempts is to continue the interrupted tradition of radicalism in the Russian art.