Architexturez. wrote: > | the first (we hope of many) soviet union > | architecture stories in syndicated news >
| BBC seems to sympathise, with the | mayor in typical Cons doublespeak | (did george orwell not coin the word | while broadcasting BBC to India?) Russia's capital finds a new face Moscow's cityscape has changed radically since the fall of communism, but at a cost, as the BBC News website's Patrick Jackson discovered. Showers of welder's sparks gust through the night sky above Moscow's frozen city centre. Glass and steel palaces of business and leisure gleam like mirages in the gloom. Out in the park at Tsaritsyno, where a real palace has stood famously unfinished for centuries since Catherine the Great snubbed its design, modern metal roof frames top the elegant walls. This is a city awash with money rebuilding itself after decades of communist rule, and the boom shows no sign of abating, in season or out. Encouraged by Yury Luzhkov, city mayor since 1992, it is a boom which some fear is sweeping away the city's rich architectural heritage to make way for the new. Campaigners for its preservation were in London last week to raise funds through a lecture at the Royal Geographical Society. .... Public monuments are equally uneven in the capital. Mr Moskvin-Tarkhanov suggests that the rash of new monuments designed by Georgian sculptor Zurab Tsereteli, while having a humour and flair of their own, jar with most Muscovites. Tsereteli's Peter The Great boat monument, he believes, could work if it was shifted out of view of the Kremlin and up to the city's Northern River Port. "Look, this is one of the monuments of the 1990s, when we were only starting out," he adds. "Things are taking shape now and developing in an orderly, predictable, boring, measured fashion." Certainly, Moscow's chief architect, Alexander Kuzmin, has promised 2006 will see few surprises for the city, describing it as a year of consolidation. Maps will have its eyes peeled. cont'd.... http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4749144.stm _______________________________________________ in-enaction mailing list http://mail.architexturez.net/mailman/listinfo/in-enaction + Architexturez collaborative at http://portal.architexturez.org/
