The New Face of Russia

The dominant feature of all the plans Foster + Part­ners have for Russia are the new facilities they include for the visual and performing arts. With museums, exhibition spaces, conference centres and concert halls—together with shops, restaurants, hotels, offices and apartments—Foster's vision reflects "culture as a driving force, not seen as an adversary of commercial development". His ideas may be revolutionary in terms of international architecture, but Foster's approach is nonetheless perfectly adapted to the value system of ordinary Russians. Unlike many architects and city planners, Lord Foster is a man prepared to take his own medicine. His London base, Riverside, is a pioneering example of a mixed-use building—with Foster and Partners' studio occupying the lower three levels, luxury apartments on the next five floors and he and his Spanish wife occupying the penthouse— all of which share spectacular views of the river. His wife runs her own art publishing business, the Ivory Press, from the same building. The riverside development is even re­flected in the title he chose when raised to the peerage in 1999—Baron Foster of Thames Bank. The Fosters have, however, recently moved their official residency to an 18th century chateau in Switzerland.
For Foster to have chosen an 18th century building as a new home should come as no surprise. His respect for historic buildings—indeed love of them—has informed some of his most admired projects: the adaptation of Ber­lin's Reichstag into a home for a modern parliament, the creation of the Great Court in the British Museum and the insertion of the Sackler Galleries into London's Royal Academy—which he describes as "kissing the old with the new". Foster's genius for synthesis is also to be harnessed in Russia. Work began last year on his re-animation of New Holland in St. Petersburg—an island in the centre of the city which Peter the Great used as a base for his shipbuild­ing in the 18th century—while Moscow's Pushkin Museum has commissioned the conversion of a whole quarter of the city—just below the Kremlin—into a museum precinct in­cluding, of course, concert and conference halls, hotels, of­fices and apartments.
It will be another "city within a city" but this time without vertical ambitions. In their place, Foster is proposing a space "below ground informed by natural light" with a central plaza and a life of its own—an alternative which pedestrians may prefer in winter. Construction on Foster's vast scale is naturally a politi­cal matter. Four out of his seven Russian projects have been commissioned by a single "oligarch," Shalva Chigirinsky, whose fortune is based on property development and oil. Chigirinsky works closely with the Mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov, and shares the building where his headquarters are located with the Mayor's wife, Yelena Baturina—Rus-sia's only female billionaire who, as it happens, is also in the construction business.
While there may yet be problems with planning per­mission for some of Foster's Russian projects, there is little doubt that the Pushkin complex will go forward. When his conceptual master plan was presented to the museum coun­cil two years ago, its chairman was the soon to be President of the Russian Federation, Dmitry Medvedev, then a deputy prime minister. The new pedestrian district centred on the museum abuts the towering walls of the Kremlin making it easy for the President to keep an eye on it. Funding for the conversion was allocated for the first phase of the project earlier this year by the federal government. The future of one of the major Foster/Chigirinsky/ Luzhkov projects, however, is currently in doubt; that of the reconstruction of Moscow's Zaradye district where the world's largest hotel, the cockroach infested Rossiya, stood until it was recently demolished. This vast Soviet hotel was not much loved and occupied a prominent area of central Moscow, bordered by the Kremlin, Red Square and the riv­er. Chigirinsky, backed by the Mayor, won the tender to re­develop it. In spite of this, a dispute has now arisen over the previous ownership of the hotel and arbitration has found against the Mayor. Today, a vast section of river frontage stands boarded off and could remain in this condition for years if a new tender is called for.
Foster's plans for the space would restore some of the character of the Zaradye district destroyed to build the hotel. Colonnades will mark the principal routes, con­verging at a central public square dominated by cultural institutions—a multi-purpose concert hall, philharmonic concert hall, museum, variety theatre and banqueting hall. Generous spaces for retail, commercial and hotel accommodation adjacent to the plaza would further sup­port its renewed character, healing the scars inflicted on the district by the Rossiya. Another project, the Russia Tower, whose construc­tion began last year in Moscow, will be the tallest building in Europe at 600 metres, and have 118 habitable floors ris­ing to a pinnacle. It is discretely located 5.5 kms from Red Square but will still be visible from most parts of the city while commanding fabulous views of it. When completed, the tower will be the final mate­rialisation of a dream long cherished by Foster and first proposed for Tokyo. In 1989, he stunned the world with a plan to build his Millennium Tower 2 kms off shore in the Tokyo Bay; a conical structure of glass and steel, it was to be 840 metres high with 180 floors, capable of housing a com­munity of 60,000 people while generating its own energy and processing its own waste. The plan was aborted by the Japanese recession of the early 1990s. The Russia Tower carries forward the fundamental ideas first developed for Tokyo, importantly the "green" approach. Foster plans to harness advanced technology to make his tower environmentally friendly. The triple-glazed facade reduces heat loss while photovoltaics—or so­lar cells—not only satisfy all the building's energy needs but are also expected to feed surplus energy back into the city grid. Snow and rainwater harvesting is expected to reduce the building's call on city water supplies by 30 per cent.
This vertical city can house 25,000 people and there will be a public viewing deck with cafes and bars at the sum­mit. Below this the residential and hotel floors can be pur­chased in large or small chunks—allowing one to buy the equivalent of a palace and have a sky garden thrown in. At street level there will be an ice rink and shops. The grandest of all Foster's Moscow schemes, also commissioned by Chigirinsky, has to be the Crystal Island project; the preliminary plans for which were approved by Mayor Luzhkov last December. If construction goes ahead it will be the largest building in the world—a megalopolis, literally a city within a city. Another glittering glass and steel construction, this time in the form of a circular tent with a diameter of 620 metres, the central pinnacle of the building will be 450 metres high—making it one of the world's tallest buildings. The shimmering tent will be set in a landscaped park on a peninsula reaching out into the Moscow river, some 7.5 kms from the Kremlin, providing an opportunity for cross country skiing and ice skating in the winter. A whole city in miniature will be contained within the glazed tent. A second skin and thermal buffer for the main building, it will shield the interior spaces from Moscow's extreme summer and winter climates. The glass provides "outdoor" accommodation that is flooded with daylight that can be sealed in winter to minimise heat losses, while opening in summer so that the interior can be cooled naturally. Efficient energy management is at the heart of the design, which also includes a full range of cultural and service facilities. When they are completed, Crystal Island and the Russia Tower will define the style of new Moscow just as Stalin's vast skyscrapers of the l94Qs and 5Qs define the character of the Soviet period. The latter were meant as monumental statements of the power of the people, while the Foster towers will reflect the power of Mayor Luzhk­ov and his friends. Chigirinsky has also commissioned a tower construction for the Siberian oil town, Khanty Man­siysk. This one will be 280 metres high and facetted like a cut diamond-to maximise daylight through the winter months-reflecting and refracting natural light to illumi­nate the interior spaces.
Chigirinsky's influence has also spread to St. Peters­burg where there was a groundbreaking ceremony for Fos­ter's renovation of New Holland Island during the 2QQ7 White Nights. This popular scheme will retain the 19th century red brick warehouses round the perimeter, turn­ing them into hotel and retail space. In its original role as a shipbuilding warehouse, the island required an internal ca­nal leading to a large pond in the centre. Foster envisages a stage in the centre of the water overlooked by a 2,QQQ- seat Festival Hall providing the dominant note of the island; Maestro Gergiev and his orchestra gave a concert there to celebrate the ground breaking. His opera theatre, the Mariinsky, is almost in sight of the island and his company is expected to perform there during the White Nights Fes­tival in future years. St. Petersburg's other Foster development, a 65,000 square metre complex of residential, retail and office space to replace the 1938 Frunzensky department store has run into snags. The city planning office has ruled that the present building by Evgeni Katonin is a significant ele­ment of the city's architectural heritage and cannot be de­stroyed. St. Petersburg is fussier about these kinds of things than Moscow. Nevertheless, Foster is set to leave his mark on Rus­sia in a very big way. He is welcome because Russians want their buildings to dazzle the world. And they have enough money to realize Foster's dreams. The megalopolis en­closed in a glass and steel case using the most advanced technologies to conserve or generate energy-and save the planet-has been a long time in gestation and could be the most significant contribution to worldwide architecture of Foster's generation. It is pleasing to reflect that all this is being achieved by a man of working class origin who left school at 1á. Through personal determination he found his way to the Yale School of Architecture, where he met his future busi­ness partner Richard Rogers. When the two broke up, it initially looked as if Rogers-with the Pompidou Centre in Paris and the Lloyds Building in London to his name-had been the leading force in the partnership. However Foster, working in conjunction with Buckminster Fuller, was de­veloping lightweight structures, and when commissioned to build the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, completed in 198á, Foster's lead was restored.
The Century Tower in To­kyo, which opened in 1991 and was inspired by the Hong Kong Bank, led to the commission of the Millennium Tow­er for Tokyo Bay and the dream which is now effectively to be realised in Moscow. The Russia Tower and Crystal Is­land could easily become two of the newest wonders of the known world.
Top: Norman Foster, photographed by Ti Foster.

Geraldine Norman