Restoration is urgently needed to save the avant-garde
masterpiece, says the architect’s great-grandson
By Sophia Kishkovsky. Web only
Published online: 19 June 2012
The Shukhov radio tower in Moscow is in dire condition and
may be lost if it is not properly restored soon, according to Vladimir Shukhov,
the great-grandson of the engineer and architect (also called Vladimir Shukhov)
who designed the structure. The 90-year-old tower is regarded as an
architectural masterpiece of the Russian avant-garde and has influenced
contemporary architects including Norman Foster.
“If the tower is not put into order, or if real work on it
– on a professional, international basis – is not begun by the 160th
anniversary of Shukhov's birth, which will be celebrated [in August 2013], it
would be simpler to order that the tower be demolished, so that it shames
neither my ancestors nor our country,” Shukhov said at a news conference in
Moscow in March.
Shukhov is the president of the Shukhov Tower Foundation,
which is fighting to save the 160m-tall hyperboloid tower. It was commissioned
by Lenin and constructed between 1920 and 1922 using a lattice shell technique
that Vladmir Shukhov patented and first applied to structures for an industrial
and art fair in Nizhny Novgorod in 1896.
For many years, the Shukhov tower was the main transmission
tower and emblem of Soviet television, before it was replaced by the Ostankino
television tower. Although the Shukhov tower is in Shabolovka, a central Moscow
district, there is no access for visitors because it is still controlled by the
state’s radio and television transmission agency and the grounds are occupied
by several organisations.
In 2010, Foster described the tower in an open letter as “a
structure of dazzling brilliance and great historic importance”, warning that
it requires “urgent attention” to save it. The tower inspired Foster's
skyscraper at 30 St Mary Axe (known as the “Gherkin”) in the City of London,
which opened in 2004, and the 600m-tall Canton Tower (formerly the Guangzhou TV
and Sightseeing Tower) in China, designed by the Dutch architects Mark Hemel
and Barbara Kuit, which opened in 2010.
Last year, the then prime minister Vladimir Putin ordered
the allocation of Rb135m ($4.3m) to reconstruct the Shukhov tower, but Vladimir
Shukhov believes that reconstructing rather than restoring the structure could
result in an unsatisfactory modern replica. Shukhov says that Russian officials
have not sought the input of foreign experts who are ready to work on a plan
for the tower for a nominal fee, and that the European Union has allocated a
comparable sum just to study his great-grandfather's design heritage. “There is
a lack of understanding [at] state level of the importance of this monument,” Shukhov
says.
In April, the United Metallurgical Company, a Russian
metals conglomerate that supports the preservation of Shukhov's designs,
published a book of his photographs of early 20th-century Russian industrial
sites and everyday life. Shukhov’s family managed to save his photo archive
during the Soviet era.
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