The Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg, built by Alberto Kavos in 1860, is
in desperate need of renovation. The ballet and opera company, which employs two
thousand people and recently established an Academy for Young Singers and a
Youth Orchestra, requires a second and possibly third stage, additional
rehearsal space and new technology. The theater needs money for its ongoing
operations, and the city of St. Petersburg has an urgent need for revenue, which
could be brought in by the tourism industry if its infrastructure were better
developed. Perhaps most importantly, the city, which was created almost three
hundred years ago and yet has not changed much since the 18th century, needs new
ideas to bring it into the 21st.
All these concerns were on Valery Gergiev's mind when he came up with
the idea of creating a large cultural and business zone around the theater about five
years ago. It would include the original theater, the new stage and a group
of renovated buildings in which shops, restaurants, hotels and concert spaces
could accommodate thousands of visitors. As the artistic director of the
Mariinsky, Gergiev knows well just how important such zones are for major Western
cities. These days, he is spending plenty of time in one of them — he has
been conducting since December at the Metropolitan Opera in New York's Lincoln
Center.
No one in Russia questions Gergiev and the Mariinsky's indispensable positions in Russian culture, and they received a green light for the project in 1997, when Boris Yeltsin was in power. After a series of typically Russian bureaucratic hurdles, the job finally began. Millions of rubles were spent last year preparing the area for construction, and in October 2001 the State Construction Agency — Gosstroy — held a competition inviting a handful of select architects to submit proposals.
A month ago the first official viewing of the submissions of the two finalists took place. A commission, which included the minister of culture, minister of construction, director of the State Hermitage museum and the governor of St. Petersburg, rejected a project by St. Petersburg architect Oleg Romanov as tame and unexciting. The favored submission came from an American neoexpressionist architect Eric Owen Moss. Moss' proposal included a new steel and glass building, approximately 50 meters tall, with a bridge connecting it across a canal to the original Mariinsky Theater.
All of the major Russian newspapers covered the proposals extensively, and the predominant tone was negative, sometimes even hostile. Journalistic objectivity is still an alien concept for a majority of the Russian press, and most reporters immediately choose one side of an issue. With the exception of the influential Commersant, which published two positive articles on the project, and Kultura, which tried to be neutral, the Russian press sided with the most conservative factions of the public. The Moscow News , for instance, characterized the project as "illiterate from the professional point of view and criminal in relation to our heritage." The same paper declared the situation "scandalous," and accused Gergiev, who generally supported Moss' proposal, of attempting to build a "mausoleum for himself." The St. Petersburg Academy of Arts and other institutions and individuals sent letters of protesting Moss' project. Many demanded a new international contest.
The outrage isn't surprising. Since the early 1930s, no foreign architect has designed anything of substance in the city, which — it must be noted — was originally planned and built by foreigners. As a result, St. Petersburg, like Russia as a whole, is several decades behind the rest of the world when it comes to modern architecture. New structures built in the city after World War II looked like studies in restrictions, isolation, stagnation and boredom — all typical features in the Soviet era.
It is particularly difficult to do something innovative in St. Petersburg's historic center. Built mostly during 18th and 19th centuries, this district's streets and squares are renowned for their elegance and beauty, and any proposed deviation from their style is perceived as a destruction of the existing harmony. As Mark Khidekel, a St. Petersburg architect who now lives and works in New York, points out, "this is a living museum, where each building is an object in context." And it seems that nobody is willing to try the Parisian method of incorporating radically new architecture into the old quarters.
Others, mindful of the Soviet methods for making important decisions, are simply suspicious of the fact that other foreign architects were not invited to submit their proposals. And some design professionals say that Moss's project is not innovative enough.
.jpg)
For his part, Moss says that he studied the vicinity and history with care
and respect. Speaking by phone from his office in Culver City, California, the
architect says, "We made a very careful analysis of the historic district of St.
Petersburg, starting with the Winter Palace, the Hermitage, the Alexander
Column, the statue of Peter the Great.. And we made an intelligent argument for
what we proposed as it related to what is already there. History runs in two
directions — it does not only run behind you, it runs in front of you,
and if you understand that what runs in front of you is only a repetition of
what's behind you, that is a different idea of history. Yes, the project
suggests new ideas, yes, the building is innovative, yes, the building is
progressive — but all our decisions are sitting on the pieces of
history of St. Petersburg".
Moss notes that his work draws on previous Russian and Soviet architecture, including the famous futurist drawing made in 1918 by Nathan Altman for a structure to be built on the Palace Square for the celebration of the first anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. "We studied it as another piece of the tradition for this project," the architect explains. "We also discovered a proposal for the New Holland area, made in 1880 — it includes a new theater, and another from 1910 for making it a large public square."
Moss and his associates also looked at a number of old studies of how to renovate the Mariinsky, and found ideas similar to their own. The Mariinsky, however, is just a part of the project, which includes rebuilding the whole New Holland area (across the Krukov Canal from Mariinsky) and eventually tying the city's major cultural institutions together (from the Hermitage to the Rimsky-Korsakov Conservatory). In Moss' words, the plan aims at "unifying the city, making it a continuum as opposed to just selective events."
Ultimately, Moss says, he and his team hope to balance a "a very careful reconciliation of existing conditions and circumstances" with an opportunity to "open up to what used to be called 'a window to the West' through an exchange of artistic views between Russia and the United States."
Currently, Moss is proceeding with plans, while awaiting final approval from the federal government. The architect has received strong support from Gergiev, who keeps Moss' architectural drawings with him in New York.
"It excites and irritates," says Gergiev. "that is what I like about it. I
want it to be seen by young people, the more the better, and hear their
opinion." The conductor adds that he hopes to overcome the conservatism still
prevalent in Russia. "To build the new theater as a pale copy of an old one
would be a mistake."
