An interview with Dmitri and Andrei Barkhin

JULY 3/2008

Dmitri Barkhin (D.B.) has designed and built numerous offices and banks in Moscow; he is also an architectural historian and an expert on the work of the eighteenth-century Russian architect Vasili Bazhenov.

Andrei Barkhin (A.B.) is also an architect and is writing a doctoral thesis at The Research Institute of the Theory of Architecture and Town Planning on the architecture of the 1930s in the USSR, Europe and the USA (Art Deco).

Dmitri and Andrei Barkhin are representatives of the third and fourth generations of a famous family of Moscow architects.

Before the October Revolution, Grigory Barkhin, the founder of the dynasty, worked in the spirit of neo-classicism; after the revolution, he became a famous representative of the l920s Soviet avant-garde, erecting the consmtctivist-style building that housed the editorial staff and publisher of the newspaper 'Izvestiia' on Pushkin Square.

His son, Boris Barkhin, the father of Dmitri, won fame as the designer of Moscow's Museum of the Armed Forces of the USSR and the Tsiolkovsky State Museum of the History of Cosmonautics in Kaluga, built in the 1970s.

Haw do you rate the developments in architecture in Moscow over the past few years?

D.B.: The city needs to change its policy regarding the conservation of architectural monuments; it is essential to preserve and restore the originals, and not tear them down.

In particular, it is necessary to act now to maintain those fragments of the eclectic nineteenth-century city and the most interesting Soviet buildings, which will soon also need restoration I would like to separate the historical centre from gargantuan «La Defense» districts, taking an approach similar to the one successfully applied in Paris.

However, the most important task is a new program for rebuilding the city's lost churches (that is, those demolished under the Soviet regime), albeit not necessarily in their original location. It was right and proper to rebuild the Cathedral of Christ the Redeemer (reduced to its foundations in 1932). although the sculptures on the facades are somewhat modern.

Nevertheless, the sumptuous interior astonishes the onlooker with the richness and complexity of the stone carvings, and the beauty of the murals. New, post-modern constructions on the Garden Ring - the House of Music near the Paveletsky railway station and the Atrium shopping and entertainment centre in front of the Kursk railway station - are not good examples of modem architecture.

I agree with the idea of creating a new ring of skyscrapers, providing the city space with new landmarks. This idea has. however, lost some of its steam; in Moscow the construction of tall buildings is only taking place in the City district, Moscow's Manhattan.*

It is a pity that few are interested in the elegant skyscrapers of the American Art Deco movement - the high-rise buildings in Moscow-City are nothing but glass prisms. A recently built skyscraper, the Triumph-Palace, possesses neither beautiful details nor an attractive silhouette.

It is strange that the builders ignored the experience of the Soviet architects, the creators of its predecessors, the seven famous skyscrapers of post-war Moscow.

* Moscow's City, also known as the Moscow International Business Centre, is a commercial district in central Moscow currently undergoing intense development.

A.B.: The main architectural event in Russia at the end of the twentieth century was the reconstruction of the Cathedral of Christ the Redeemer, which had been destroyed by the Bolshevik regime. However, in general, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, what set Moscow apart from Europe was the way we ruthlessly destroyed our cultural heritage on a massive scale; those in power simply ignored the opinions of those defending it. At the same time, Soviet modernist buildings from the 1960s and 1970s are also being pulled down, for example the Rossiya, Inturist and Minsk hotels. Since Moscow has some of the highest real estate prices in the world, the fate of the old houses in the centre is in question.

The competition with the high-rise districts of European capitals and the cities of the USA, as well as the desire to live up to the seven Stalinist skyscrapers, has motivated the construction of the City district and tenement blocks in the style of a simplified historicism, as with the Triumph-Palace on Leningrad Prospect.

After the collapse of the USSR, architectural historicism, or the retro style (that is. the imitation of European or Russian architectural styles - renaissance, baroque or classicist), was revived in various forms. The great majority of buildings were constructed with only an allusion to historicism in that the commercial buildings built on the city's streets used industrial methods. This was the post-Soviet answer of the 1990s to the Western post-modernism of the 1980s. Before 1991, architects still wanted to work with Western post-modernism, and when the opportunity actually presented itself, many emulated the implied historicism of Ricardo Bofill.

A new and important stage in the development of Moscow's architecture was the repeated attempts to equal the architecture of so-called' Stalinist classicism' ("the numerous domestic and administrative buildings of the 1940s and the first half of the 1950s) and Soviet Art Deco (Moscow State University, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and other well-known skyscrapers), for example the Shuvalovsky district recently built on Lomonosov Prospekt.

A number of patrons, tiring of the laconic style of Soviet Corbusierism. started to order richly decorated buildings, the presence of which also distinguishes Moscow from other Western capitals; these include works by the consistent neo-classicists Dmitri Barkhin and Mikhail Fihppov.

For a number of reasons, the classical style, recalling the whole spectrum from Greco-Roman antiquity, through not only the Italian renaissance, but also the French classicism of the seventeenth century and the Russian classicism of 1760-1810. to the neo-classical direction in Art Nouveau and the brutal imperial 'Stalinist classicism", has become a part of the architectural market in Russia and Moscow. Initially, at the turn of the century, private patrons, who commissioned small buildings on the outskirts of the city, revived classicism.

This was the private initiative of architects and patrons who felt nostalgia for the old city, which had been partially destroyed by the Soviet regime. Over the last few years, neo-classical buildings have started springing up on prestigious sites in the centre, for example the Marriot Hotel on Tver Street. They are designed by post-modern architects striving after echoes and references; authentic detail is not important to them. The most stupid and comical pseudo-historicism, which is full of post-modernist compromises, is to be found in the very centre of Moscow, for example the Okhotnyi Riad shopping centre on Manege Square or the Tsar's Gardens block of flats on the island in the Moskva River, and on the outskirts near the Borisov ponds, the Church dedicated to the thousandth anniversary of the baptism of Rus.

However, the reconstructions of the Resurrection Gate, the Iveron Chapel and the Church of Our Lady of Kazan on Red Square represent a more accurate version of historicism. In each specific case, everything depends on the architects' ability and attention to detail and on the wishes of the patron.

The buildings beyond the outskirts of Moscow were built in the style of simplistic historicism from the very beginning. Designs were circulated based on a client's photographs of foreign mansions and villas. Along the roads around Moscow, ugly and opulently decorated mansions sprang up that were often reminiscent of Hollywood film sets.

In general, what developments took place in Moscow in the second half of the twentieth century? And how are these reflected in your own work?

D.B.: After the change in regime in the mid-1950s - marked by the death of Stalin and the onset of the Thaw - there was an emphatic change in the official architectural style, from pompous imperial classicism to the Soviet version of modernism. For Moscow, this meant a second wave of the demolition of architectural monuments in the centre and the construction of New Arbat Street and the Kremlin Palace of Congresses.

The idea of low-storey buildings from pre-fabricated concrete slabs was executed, without taking into account the fact that the low building density would stretch out the city's surface area and raise communication costs. At last, the communal flats were broken up, and also people who had been living in cellars and barracks from the revolutionary period to Khrushchev’s post-war reforms could find new homes. Not all Soviet modernist buildings of the 1960s and 1970s were unsatisfactory; one exception was. for example the Pioneers' Palace in the Sparrow Hills.

A new stage in the development of the city and modernist architecture was the preparation for the 1980 Olympics. At this time. I was already involved in the construction of real buildings - the International Trade Centre in the Presnensky district, the President Hotel on Great Iakimanka Street and the International Bank Complex on Sakharov Prospekt.

After the building and financial crisis during Perestroika, new, private money flowed into the construction industry, as well as private commissions, often for mansions m the classical style. The years of building in a semi-historicist maimer arrived. It was a compromised style, restricted by a poor knowledge of the classical idiom. The new customers were fixated on the retro style. Tins required architects to study in detail a far wider range of architectural monuments from past epochs and model their work on them. The desire to emulate the neo-classical work of my grandfather and father compelled me to immerse myself in a study of the classics. At that time, even restorers were not able to help with advice. The search for a solution forced one to turn, to books and albums on classical architecture.

An important moment in my professional development was the task of constructing additional floors for the block of fiats built by my father for the Ministry of Defence on Smolensk Embankment No. 5. It was necessary to complete the design with a Venetian-style tower. My love for the classical antiquity and the renaissance was further displayed in this work. I call constructions in the contemporary high-tech style, which one must sometimes build in spite of everything, barns, even when they are done perfectly professionally. The combination of the solid with the transparent, of glass with the solid, of the round with the quadratic or the crooked with the straight - this is still not architecture! I prefer the concept of uniting the classical and contemporary styles. The classical is more expensive in terms of manufacturing, but it is also more beautiful.

A new piece of historic architecture, constructed to the highest quality and with taste, will reap rewards in the future. The professionalism of the architect gives the investor and the town a competitive advantage in the struggle for customers. Developers are looking for new ideas, but do not find them in the miserly emotions of the high-tech; rather, it is antiquity that fires the imagi¬nation.

Human beings must live in a space decorated like a museum, and architects have to learn from their great predecessors. We have to answer the work of the old masters fittingly with new buildings in the classical spirit. Our clients agree with me; they want to live in a historical city, invest in it and earn dividends on it. The duty of the architect is to organize space correctly and beautifully, to form facades and interiors with classical decor.

A.B.: The centre of Moscow, which in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was not the empires capital, was always characterized by a variety of styles. In the nineteenth century, huge tenement houses were built on impoverished noble estates from the eighteenth century in the streets of a city with a medieval arrangement. The destruction of old buildings, the laying of new streets and the construction of new, pompous buildings in the 1930s-1950s did not create a layout that can be read easily. It is Moscow's characteristic chaos of styles that distinguishes it from St. Petersburg or Paris.

No action was taken in the 1990s to conserve the centre in order to develop tourism. The heterogeneity of the historic centre shaped the tastes of architects and their clients, inspiring them to undertake projects in various styles. Those in power in Moscow and the city's architects particularly liked the contrast of the classical with contemporary architecture, an example of which can be seen in the construction of the glass pyramid in the Louvre. With an eye to foreign trends, some architects even began to use the high-tech style (that is an architecture based on the use of cutting-edge industrial technology often in the form of glass-clad buildings), despite the fact that the climate in Moscow, and in Russia in general, makes the upkeep of such constructions expensive.

And how do you envisage the Moscow of the future?

D.B.: In order to make the city attractive to tourists, it is necessary to rebuild the lost treasures, above all the churches. In the past. Moscow boasted thousands of churches; given the eightfold increase in the size of the city over the last hundred years, it would be possible to clone the architectural monuments in order to recreate the original concentration and density of authentic architectural forms in the city space. One could begin with those churches that were measured and photographed before their destruction in the 1930s-1950s by architects and historians who were trying to preserve their forms for posterity. The new constructions should be undertaken in the spirit of the Paris of Baron Haussmann or the Vienna of Carl Semper. However, it is clear that the economics of this will not be simple. Genuine classics are expensive when built over a whole city. We need a blend of residential, commercial and administrative buildings, covering the whole range from the simplified classicism of Ricardo Bofill to the authentic neo-classicism of Ivan Zholtovskv. ** It is no secret that the majority of clients want to live in the centre of the city, in prestigious and comfortable houses with high ceilings and richly decorated facades. High-tech is a style for office buildings. For this reason, the mansions on Moscow's outskirts, as well as the new residential blocks, are more often than not built in one of the retro styles.

** He imitated, for example, a renaissance palace by Palladio in his design for the Intourist building in 1932.

And what are the prospects for neo-classicism in Moscow?

D.B.: The rulers of Moscow have finally come to value the historical buildings that are intact. Recently, the pseudo-gothic palace in Tsaritsino was beautifully restored. I hold the restoration of this complex in high regard because I prefer to see this monument in use rather than destroyed through rain, snow or climbers using it for practice. It is just a pity that the new outbuildings in the area of the palace's park copy the style of the pavilions of Tsaritsino.

This misleads the uninformed visitor with regards to the extent and layout of the original historical complex. In general, it is our task to create a Moscow that attracts tourists who want to look at beauty, even if it is pseudo-historical. Only a few architects know how to work in the historical style in Moscow, and I am one of them.

I have spent more than 40 years learning how to create historical beauty in Moscow, and in doing so, how to generate millions of additional dollars for Russia and the capital. Classical architecture is eternal, universal, beautiful and more expressive than others. Its various forms have existed as long as contemporary European civilization - two and a half thousand years It is interesting that from the time of the Italian renaissance to our day. clients have preferred antique or modernized classicism for administrative or commercial buildings (there is a private bank in the famous Palazzo Strozzi in Florence).

Companies and enterprises, dealing with large amounts of money, have historically preferred to invest in high-quality real estate that is independent of the vicissitudes of fashion.

In 1955 the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union under Khrushchev announced the struggle against 'architectural superfluities" (in particular, ornamentation and details): they dissolved the Academy of Architecture and turned to industrial methods in order to make building cheaper and faster, flooding the city with street upon street of buildings made out of pre-fabricated concrete slabs.

After forty years in which architecture has barely existed in Russia, it is necessary to revive it. Only classical forms can guarantee high returns for investors. Classical buildings in the city centre are attractive for investors, not so much because of the location as on account of the style. It is necessary to extend the historical centre of the city; in the place of the miserable concrete dwellings, we need new classical blocks of flats with rich embellishment.

How do you rate the work of foreign architects in Moscow?

D.B.: Their presence can barely be felt in contemporary architecture. This is because those who do come here seem to be those who have not found success in their own country and are now looking for it here. The one exception is. perhaps, Norman Foster; however, his imitation to work in Moscow had more to do with politics and international cooperation than with architecture. For this reason. Ins activity cannot and will not exhibit either influence or import for our situation. The fact that he was asked to design and build a tower in Moscow-City is in itself not bad because we had already long forgotten how to design and build such ambitious high-rise buildings; we lack the designers, experience and necessary industry. All the other architects have offered us is their version of a long out-of-date post-modernism, which on Russian soil and in Russian hands turns into an old-fashioned colonial or provincial architecture. This is really nothing to be proud of. and it would be strange to learn from it. Post-modernism came to an end a long time ago: only classical architecture remains eternal and unchanging.

Translated from the Russian by Chris Gilley

D.Barkhin
A.Barkhin

Tupolev plaza, 2006
http://a-barhin.livejournal.com/209386.html