Back in May 2005, the AR reported on the growing threat to Russia’s depleting stock of modern buildings, following a tip-off from Catherine Cooke, the highly respected scholar and campaigner for Russian art and architecture who sadly died in February 2004. January 2010 saw the death of another campaign protagonist, David Sarkisyan, director of the Shchusev State Museum of Architecture. Clem Cecil, co-founder of the Moscow Architecture Preservation Society (MAPS), wrote in The Times that Sarkisyan was ‘one of the most important figures of the post-Soviet cultural scene in Russia’. In a more recent conversation with the AR, Cecil said that with Sarkisyan’s death the campaign lost ‘a key ally’, placing Moscow’s extensive architectural heritage in even greater jeopardy.
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Now, the JSC Ogonek printing plant in Moscow, the only completed building by Russian architect and artist El Lissitzky, is also facing demolition. Lissitzky’s building and the neighbouring Zhurgaz House (a constructivist apartment block by Barsch and Zunblad, architects of the Moscow planetarium) are under threat from a commercial apartment block under construction in the house’s yard. JSC INTECO is once again involved, and some mysterious influence appears to have disabled the Moskomnasledie (the body responsible for Moscow’s cultural heritage), which has been accused of ‘responding to appeals from the public with helpless inaction’.
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