Architecture Here and There

Illustrations: Top, Proposed Gazprom tower in St. Petersburg, Russia; below first, St. Petersburg (Wikipedia); below second, Grande Arche in La Defense, Paris; below third, CCTV and burned TVCC in Beijing; below bottom, Gazprom entry by Rem Koolhaas

* * *

Progress alert: This is the first blog version of a Brussat column in The Providence Journal that includes a comment on the text (in superbrackets "{ ... }") by the author.

* * *

NOTWITHSTANDING (as usual) the wishes of its citizens, St. Petersburg has invited modern architecture to destroy its beauty.

Perhaps that overstates the case a bit. The mayor of St. Petersburg okayed its first and Europe's tallest skyscraper last month. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin could stop it, but don't hold your breath. Yet, the proposed site of the Gazprom tower is 3.7 miles from the city's historic center -- not quite Siberia, but also not plopped amid Peter the Great's brilliant classical city, founded in 1703.

That's a relief. In placing the headquarters for a subsidiary of Russia's natural gas monopoly away from the center, the Russians display the sort of sensitivity to heritage that has been shown especially by Rome, to a lesser extent by Paris, and barely at all by London or any major American city.

But at 1,322 feet tall, the skyscraper would be visible from, if not Wassila, Alaska, then still too many places closer by. It has been revived after the global recession almost killed it. It may survive the U.N.'s threat to strip the city (called Leningrad from 1918 to 1991) of "world heritage" status. Ha! Imagine Lenin quaking in his boots at that! Imagine Putin!

Well, we can hope. Still, building it away from the center reduces my own concern for St. Petersburg's classical heritage. Most people on the city's famous Nevsky Prospekt -- its Champs Élysée, its Westminster Street -- will not see it, except in the distance down a street. It will no more ruin St. Petersburg's beauty than La Défense, symbolized by the stupid empty rectangle visible since 1989 through the Arc de Triomphe, ruins central Paris. A Gazprom tower would hurt St. Petersburg but not ruin it.

La Défense is today the largest "edge city" in Europe. By now, 31 mostly office towers in La Défense are taller than the stupid empty rectangle, known as the Grande Arche. The tallest at 610 feet doubles the height of the Grande Arche but is merely half that of the Gazprom tower. Yet the 689-foot Tour Montparnasse in Paris's 15th Arrondissement is worse than the whole La Défense carnage together.

The Gazprom tower outside of central St. Petersburg will, for that matter, be all by itself, at least for a while. If it is built, it might perhaps be enjoyed as a solitary spike into the sky, the sort of "wow" experience that modern architecture is good at. A large collection of glass towers, seen from afar, is what modern architecture does best. But "seen from afar" is important. Up close and personal, the experience is, shall we say, less than exhilarating.

A reader of The Times of London commenting on the new modern architecture in Beijing has a warning for St. Petersburg: "I spent two years living in Beijing (in another country prone to bouts of 'look at me and how powerful I desperately want you to think I am' style building). There is no life around the new developments there. They breathe a cold soullessness and only assume any elegance when viewed from a minimum of a kilometer distance."

He probably refers to the Olympics area with its Bird's Nest stadium that looks like a coil of barbed wire, and the headquarters of China's official television network, CCTV, which looks like a machine for stomping on the masses. Nearby is the TVCC hotel, which burned before it was done, leaving a charred and dented hulk. One wag noted that a passerby unaware of the blaze might think it was supposed to look charred and dented. After all, it is modern architecture, right? Actually, it was supposed to look dented but not charred. So if they decide to leave it that way, who will know the difference?

{Readers of this blog will naturally note the similarity between architecture that crushes the masses in China and architecture that crushes the masses in Paris.}

Both the CCTV and the TVCC were designed by Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, whose entry in the Gazprom design competition was rejected (he then called for a boycott of design competitions). The winning Gazprom proposal was designed by the British firm RMJM. It looks like London's 591-foot-tall Gherkin yanked and then twisted. Russia cowers at plans for a European missile shield but invites foreign modernists to bombard its cities. London has already been bombed into submission by modernism. It has places that are lovely but is no longer a lovely place. Providence is a lovely place precisely because its modernist buildings remain (no thanks to its civic "leadership") too few for its ruination. Newport surpasses Providence in beauty because its modern architecture is limited to America's Cup Avenue.

Better 1,322 feet of Gazprom beyond the edge of St. Petersburg's classical civitas than 13 squat Gazproms scattered within its historic center.

Were I czar of Providence, I'd gladly trade away all of our new scatboxes in Waterplace Park for a Gazprom tower at Conley's Wharf! Our modernist towers in the Financial District I would permit to remain. Individually they are tedious, yet they are what the preservationists call "contributing" structures: filler buildings that join with their betters in a grand if modestly populated skyline crescendo.

I'm no czar, but Vlad Putin is. May he smash his shoe upon the Gazprom! But don't hold your breath waiting for him to knuckle under to the U.N.

David Brussat is a member of The Journal's editorial board (dbrussat@projo.com). His blog at projo.com is called Architecture Here and There.

 Tags  architecture Gazprom Paris Providence RI Rem Koolhaas St. Petersburg Vladimir Putin World Heritage City

---