The Classical City online journal is jointly edited by Anton Glikin and Youry Makoussinsky and published by The Classical City Association.
The Classical City online journal is jointly edited by Anton Glikin and Youry Makoussinsky and published by The Classical City Association.
After many years of resistance St Petersburg has finally succumbed under the siege of modernism. The assault began with the infliction of such deconstructionist vandalisms as the new Mariinsky Theatre and the imposition of cheap kiosk-like inclusions in the city’s centre. The current destruction of Russian heritage started however in Moscow. Some estimates suggest that over 400 Moscow landmarks have gone forever in last 10 years.
From the 1917 October Revolution until recently, St Petersburg successfully resisted major developments in its historic centre. Even the tough Bolshevik authorities, pressured by several influential intellectuals, kept the city’s historic centre intact. After World War II, lost architecture was replaced with neutral neo-classical “Stalinist” buildings. Even after Stalin’s death in 1953, when Nikita Khruschev sanctioned modernism and ?stripped’ classicism to be the official low-cost styles, St Petersburg’s historic centre was saved by both a lack of capital funds and the retention of strict planning controls rooted in the conservative tradition of Russian school of preservation.
The past 10 years, however, have been marked by wild commercialism and an unprecedented cultural collapse. The door was opened for an invasion of corporately financed international modernism. Culturally light-weight ?New Russians’ credulously absorbed ?high styles’ from the glossy pages of Western magazines and imposed the new architecture upon the majority of people by openly Bolshevik methods.
Ironically the Russian architectural crisis occurs at the moment when modernism itself stands revealed as a spent force. In architectural theory, no one subscribes anymore to the once hallowed edicts that form must follow function and that less be regarded as more. Neo-Modernists are aware of the enormous destruction that the earlier applications of their own founding principles caused to historic cities. No modernist today, for example, claims that the 1960s Euston Station, which replaced the original neo-classical building, is superior to its neighbour, the gothic St. Pancras Station – itself nearly demolished in favour of another modernist monstrosity. In desperate attempts to reinvent themselves, modernists betray their own theoretical underpinnings. Where once “logic” was fetishised, buildings now flaunt capriciousness; where art was tolerated only as by-product of cold technicality, modern “fine” art itself is shamelessly mined for motifs. Modernist buildings, once celebrated as anonymous products of the Zeitgeist, are now obliged to be idiosyncratic, egotistical “stand-alones”. But even those who claim Lord Foster’s Gherkin “breaks the mould of the office block” would not welcome a row or a block of such formations. ?Signature gherkins’ shine only by virtue of their contemptuous disruption of the given, historic environment. In some 10-20 years from now they will be just as outdated as Euston Station.
Notwithstanding its original futuristic promises, modernism stands revealed today as a historically rooted misconception. Its greatest strides were made in the wake of an unprecedented devastation of Europe’s architectural fabric during the Second World War. Amidst the ruins, modernists promised a brave new and better world that could be built faster, cheaper and in more “appropriately” idiomatic forms. Earlier appropriations of classical vocabulary by the then defeated fascist regimes lent political and moral credence to explicitly anti-classical assaults. With hindsight, it can be seen that notions of political and architectural progressivism were too readily and too simplistically conflated.
Today modernist ideology, like the Soviet Politbureau of the 1980s, is a spent, self-serving force. Its survival depends on its capacity, conferred by the power of corporate finance, to continuously re-brand and re-sell itself. Public hunger for richer cultural reconstruction calls out for a vigorous, self-confident architectural alternative.
St Petersburg has a good chance to become a model city from which just such an alternative might spring. When initiating the current destruction, modernists unintentionally drew attention to even little known buildings. European neo-classicists must take this unprecedented historic opportunity to use public outrage in tandem with present professional acknowledgement of the ideological bankruptcy of modernism to regain the initiative. Defensive techniques should give way to attacking ones. With public support, neo-classicists should initiate proposals to replace the modernist monstrosities. As a result, not only will the existing classical architecture of St Petersburg be preserved, but the example of a living, thriving classicism in St Petersburg might well be emulated in the rest of Europe. The local disaster could be turned into a global victory. In St Petersburg there are several factors in:
1. The Russian political climate has recently changed. The authorities are currently determined to revive a strong type of state, which, unlike its disorderly and criminal recent predecessor, requires a distinguishing, authentic type of architecture. In the past, classicism served to establish a distinctly Russian imperial authenticity and there is no reason why today it should not articulate a nationally unifying idea of the State restoration.
2. Russian businessmen instinctively look in both directions. While modernism is certainly associated by them with Russia’s return to the international market, classicism evokes the pre-revolutionary glories of Russian entrepreneurial success, terminated by the events of 1917- before the spread of modernism. The neoclassical movement in Russia today has the unique opportunity – indeed, responsibility -to re-harness the potential power of this pre-revolutionary sentiment and cultural expression.
3. Excellent traditional architectural and artistic education is endangered, but still intact. In case of neo-classical revival, there will be no shortage of architectural labour.
4. Because of the city’s special history, St Petersburg’s educated class and especially its academics are most keen to promote the very complexity and richness of ?cultural texts’ that modernism’s adherents abhor. Certainly the resistance today to modernism among academics armed with cultural hindsight will be much greater in St Petersburg than it was among their earlier more tolerant, war-exhausted European predecessors.
5. Finally, were professionally educated players actively to resist modernism, the majority of citizens would have no difficulty embracing classicism as the already familiar and easily understood language of architecture.
It should perhaps be stressed that the reconstruction of a classical city today is only a part, albeit a significant one, of a larger recovery of Europe’s vigorous and versatile classical heritage. A city must once again become a visually articulated microcosm where a powerful civic ideal - rather than some post-modernist skepticism - shapes cultural development.
For many Russians such an ideal was, and remains, The Empire, with its various aspects perfectly expressed by Russian Classicism. Russia as heir of Greece and Byzantine made use of a colourful version Greek classicism. Russia’s distinctive aristocratic governance was emphasized by a somewhat romanticized flavour in Russian Classicism, which may be seen as a neo-classical parallel to the late 19th century courtly medieval-isms of Ludwig II of Bavaria. Connections between Rome and St Petersburg as capitals of similarly centralized and orderly empires were forged and evoked through the use of grandiose urban ensembles.
Properly viewed, the enriching harmonious integrity of the profound (in Russia’s case imperial) values and classicism could and should serve today as a model for a reunification of a deep-seated ideal of cultural and spiritual reconstruction with contemporary material requirements.
Founded in 1703 and named after St Peter, the city soon became the successful capital of the world’s largest and most powerful empire and one of Europe’s greatest cultural centres. We believe that the extraordinary strength and virtue of that city’s awesome architectural and cultural heritage might now be used to liberate Europe from the chains of modernism. Paradoxically, such a task, which might once have seemed inconceivable, has been made easier by the sheer scale of recent architectural recantations: if the once impregnable modernist hegemony can be stood on its head by postmodernists, it - and its off-spring - might now be put aside altogether by classicists.
2004-06-01 01:25:19
