Sots Arch

Narkomfin Building by Moisei Ginzburg, 1928–1930. A strong example of Revolutionary Rationalism, the building was designed with humane, communal spaces throughout.

Owen Hatherly of Nasty, Brutalist, and Short:

Isn't there something truly avant-garde about the lunatic model of heritage held by the Moscow authorities? Building whole series of extra stories atop 17th century villas, 'finishing' a ruined 18th century castle, putting billboards of historical buildings over their soon-to-be-demolished ruins, treating the whole city as totally mutable and extendible: isn't this the dreams of the indeterminates and metabolists finally fulfilled by the revivalists? [sic]

The comprehensive Moscow Architecture Preservation Society/SAVE European Heritage report published last month hasn't yet been released stateside. (I suppose it is an "over there" sort of report.) But I'm hoping to get my hands on a copy. I find that the Narkomfin and Melnikov House receive a lot of press over here and in the West generally (to wit), in part because those buildings fit a familiar narrative: The public dislikes them or doesn't understand them, but a scrappy band of tweedy underdogs hopes to convince them—and the city—that they're worth saving.

Except, in Moscow, that's not what's actually happening. It's Narkomfin, but also Detsky Mir. It's Melnikov House, but also St. Basil's Cathedral. Moscow's architectural crisis is many pronged. Age, decades of Soviet disrepair, greed and corruption, the incredible influence of oil and development, and incompetence and just-plain sloppiness conspire to snuff out inconvenient buildings and imperil cherished monuments. And, yeah, in the sense that this is a comprehensive crisis owing to administrative permissiveness rather than any systematic or ideological program, it is the novel crisis that Hatherly suggests.