At the centre of Yekaterinburg, the “capital of the Urals”, is an embanked expanse of water, usually translated into English as the “City Pond”, though “Lake” captures its scale rather better. It’s the heart of this industrial metropolis, an unusually compact city by Russian standards. Yekaterinburg, founded in the 18th century as part of the Russian colonisation of the Urals, lacks any classical or axial grandiosity. It has instead a rough and lively juxtaposition of styles thrown together unpretentiously. There are towering red brick mills from the years immediately before 1917; there are classical palazzos; there is a high-rise Central Business District; and there is the Boris Yeltsin Centre. An unfinished TV tower and a shiny golden-domed church look out over the scene. On a warm day in May, this is one of the loveliest urban spaces in Russia, both calm and lively.
In the last year, this “pond” has been the subject of popular protest, one where architectural style has led to the kind of contestation that isn’t meant to happen in contemporary Russia. Architecturally, the most interesting part of the pond is the peninsula occupied by the Dynamo Stadium and the smooth streamlines of the Dynamo Club, an attractive Constructivist ensemble set among trees. This is the stylistic antipode of the current proposal from the city’s oligarchs and authorities for a new church to be built on an artificial island in the heart of the pond. The project would destroy most of what is worthwhile about the space — its placidity, openness and architectural heterogeneity. The sponsors’ stylistic model is Moscow’s St Basil’s – as if to stamp a traditional Russian identity upon a deeply modern place. Many of those involved in the “defence of the Pond” have been involved with a parallel project, to rebrand Yekaterinburg as a capital of Constructivism.
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