Soaring modern towers would alter old St. Petersburg landscape, "kill city"

NYT: Russian Window on the West Reaches for the Sky
By STEVEN LEE MYERS
Published: November 28, 2006


(From left: RMJM London; Studio Daniel Libeskind; Herzog & de Meuron Architekten)
Russia’s state energy company, Gazprom, has plans for soaring towers along the Neva River. Critics say the project will overshadow the old city, but Gazprom is likely to get its way.

ST. PETERSBURG, Russia, Nov. 22 — Gazprom City, a proposed complex of stylish modern buildings that evoke, among other things, a gas-fueled flame, a strand of DNA and a lady’s high-heeled shoe, would sit on a historic site on the Neva River here, opposite the Baroque, blue-and-white Smolny Cathedral.

In any of six designs under consideration, the main tower would soar three or four times higher than this city’s most famous landmarks, an alteration of the landscape that has drawn heated protests from the director of the Hermitage Museum and the head of the local architects’ union.

But Gazprom, Russia’s state-controlled energy company, is determined to press ahead and is soon to announce the winner of an international design competition. As an arm of the Kremlin, opponents say, Gazprom usually gets its way.

During the summer the company invited prominent foreign architects to submit plans for a proposed business center for its newly acquired oil subsidiary. In an unusual gesture of openness, the company put its proposals on display here at the Academy of Arts — and on the Web at www.gazprom-city.info — and invited the public to vote.

While its proponents say the project will provide a needed economic transfusion for a city that has always labored in Moscow’s shadow, critics say there has to be a better way. “Even if it were made of solid gold,” said Vladimir V. Popov, the president of the Union of Architects of St. Petersburg, “it would nevertheless kill the city.”...

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/28/world/europe/28petersburg.html?hp&ex=1164776400&en=bb42f98219e21ab1&ei=5094&partner=homepage

... but totally out of place. Couldn't they build it outside the city in some corporate park?

I like what the French tried at La Defense. They put most of the skyscrapers that developers and others would have built within the core of the historic city out in a suburb.

Surely there are some old sites with some of the utilities put in during Soviet times and afterwards that would prove more suitable than within St. Petersburg's core.

amounts of money to be spent rebuilding the most modern progressive city in America with above ground transportation and a levee that was the envy of the world. But we have Bush/Cheney in charge and they'd rather blow things up then consider rebuilding anything...still a gapping hole in Manhattan.