VIRTUAL: Prague Heritages

Abstract

Moscow is home to some of the world’s most imposing, beautiful and fascinating buildings of the 1920s and 30s. Over the last 20 years, the crisis that Moscow’s architectural heritage has been facing has crossed the borders of post-Soviet Russia and become of interest to the international architectural community. The cause of this is the Russian capital’s Soviet constructivist masterpieces were left to deteriorate, having now gone through a phase of restoration and repurpose. The prevailing view is that a modern version of an old building is just as good as, or better, than the original, and the concept of authenticity has been lost. Focused on the city of Moscow’s ‘preservable’ history, this paper provides a critical analysis of ‘placemaking’ and ‘sense of place’ of the current state of significant realizations of Russian Modernism today through buildings such as Zuev Workers’ Club (1928) by Il’ya Golosov, the Narkomfin building (1932) by Moisei Ginzburg, and Konstanitne Melnikov’s Rusakov Workers’ Club (1928). If the challenge to save masterpieces in the context of the modern city has already been hard to achieve, convincing about the significance of these buildings in a wider urban setting is an even more difficult endeavour that remains to unfold in the years to come. Drawing upon the authors’ research in Moscow, this paper addresses the question “how new approaches to preserving the city’s architectural history can demonstrate the power of the city’s placemaking for its future.