Letter from St. Petersburg

The Leningrad textile plant is a four-hectare industrial compound with three grand halls, a workshop building and a magnificently strong towboat of a power plant. A stylistic successor of the Luckenwalde hat factory, this signature work is caught between the ideological front lines. It has braved both poor maintenance and official disapproval of its inherent design features, only to face modern threats, coming under a pretext of conservation and re-development. On 2nd April, the St Petersburg Municipal Heritage Council considered a design proposal by David Chipperfield: what would his ideas be? According to news reports, the proposal was nothing less than a denial of the factory's value. Out of generosity, the power station was to be kept, while the halls and workshops (considered not to be Mendelsohn's, structurally unsafe, and, being made of concrete, not restorable anyway) were to make room for something new – an arrangement of box-shapes would serve the factory best! Mr Burdinsky called the Heritage Council to strike the power station and factory halls off the heritage lists altogether, promising to care for the power house when given a free hand on the rest of the premises, and threatening legal action should the Council fail to follow his arguments. The Council postponed the debate. Local initiatives, spearheaded by VOOPIK, All-Russian Society for Heritage Preservation, started a busy campaign to re-establish the factory's value. It was not without irony that in the very days the Germans were restoring the Luckenwalde factory halls to their former glory, praising the qualities of early concrete and re-erecting the signature hat roof, its Leningrad counterpart was at great risk of being dramatically altered, if not demolished. Who was behind a series of articles in the local architectural press, claiming that the Red Banner was not an Erich Mendelsohn Gesamtkunstwerk, but rather a composition of true Mendelsohn (the power station) and a series of look-alikes by local designers? Who launched the story of Mendelsohn rejecting authorship of the latter buildings, and keeping the prior as a proud exception (a fact not mentioned by Bruno Zevi's monograph on Mendelsohn, nor by any other researcher yet)? Why did the developer and his architect decline to reveal their designs to the general public, while insisting that the abovementioned press reports "were all wrong so far" and that "none of the buildings are to suffer demolition"? In early June, a third consecutive session of the Council was devoted to the Red Banner factory matter. Surprised by sudden local and international interest, the developer scaled down his demolition ambitions. A victory to be celebrated? Surprising as it may seem, Russian schools of restoration, having brought countless palaces to their former glory, still lack some basics in dealing with antiques. As late as 2007, an Italian restoration workshop at St Peter's Gates of the Peter and Paul Fortress in St Petersburg, and the sensitivity it showed to the time-worn masonry and stonework, caused downright confusion among local professionals and authorities alike: why would someone spend so much time and effort in a stone-by-stone, piece-by-piece treatment of the remains? Why not tear it down and make anew, better than before? Back in 2007, a co-operation agreement was reached between the St Petersburg restorers and their Italian colleagues. In 2009, it seems, it need to be extended, both thematically and geographically. Haven't we seen manifold early modernist experiments, from the Einstein Tower to the De La Warr Pavilion, from the FIAT factory to Villa Savoy – all recently restored to their original glory and given a new life? Isn't it high time to bundle the knowledge available? Otherwise, scarcity and neglect, or negligence and prejudice, will continue to steal precious gems of our common history away from us.

Yours sincerely,
Dmitry Sukhin, Dipl.Ing.Arch

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Dmitry Sukhin (Dimitri B. Suchin), born 1974 in Leningrad, graduated Berlin Technical University 2003, Rotterdam-based architect with designed by Erick van Egeraat since 2005. Researcher in German modernism and expressionism, specializing in East Prussia and Hans Scharoun; board member of the Scharoun Society (Berlin). Architectural critic with several Russian magazines; for articles see http://mitya.ebbs.net and the coming Kaliningrad Encyclopaedia.