Gazprom Winner is ‘Corn on the Cob’

By Kevin O’Flynn and Galina Stolyarova

Staff Writer

Published: December 4, 2006 (Issue # 1227)

A 300-meter-tall twisting glass tower dubbed “the corn on the cob” beat out five international rivals to win the contentious competition to build a new Gazprom headquarters in St. Petersburg.

The decision infuriated critics, and a group of St. Petersburg’s cultural luminaries, including Hermitage director Mikhail Piotrovsky, filmmaker Alexander Sokurov, rock musician Yury Shevchuk and writer Daniil Granin threw their weight behind what threatens to become a city-wide campaign against the construction.

Yury Sdobnov, vice-president of the Russian Union of Architects has already branded the winning design “blasphemous.” The British design has also been dubbed the “Tower of Babylon” by its critics.

The head of the Hermitage Museum said the building will blight the city’s landscape.

“It is a new economic symbol for St. Petersburg,” Gazprom CEO Alexei Miller told reporters at a ceremony at the company’s current St. Petersburg offices, where he and Governor Valentina Matviyenko announced the winning design by British architect RMJM.

“It will be a new leader, echoing the already famous architectural monuments of St. Petersburg,” Miller said.

According to RMJM’s design, the tower will change color up to 10 times per day, depending on the position of the sun.

RMJM was picked from a shortlist of six internationally renowned architects, including Germany’s Daniel Libeskind and the Netherlands’ Rem Koolhaas. The other designs included ones in the shape of a DNA strand, a cluster of cubes, and an abstract design reminiscent of a flying eagle.

What will actually be built remains to be seen, as RMJM will present the final design for Gazprom’s approval in May.

“This project is not a whim for Gazprom,” Matviyenko said at the ceremony. “St. Petersburg should be happy that the No. 1 company in Russia is coming to the city.”

Critics, however, see the tower as a symbol of Gazprom’s control over the city. The tower will form the centerpiece of Gazprom-City, a business and residential center that will be built opposite Smolny Cathedral, one of the city’s most famous landmarks.

Polls have shown that up to 90 percent of residents are against the tower and architectural experts said it would destroy the architectural harmony of the city.

The tower, if constructed, would be 2.5 times higher than the Peter and Paul Fortress, the city’s highest building, and more than 3 times higher than Smolny Cathedral or St. Isaac’s Cathedral.

The St. Petersburg Union of Architects went as far as to refuse to take part in the design competition.

Japanese architect Kisho Kurokawa, who is designing a replacement for the city’s Kirov stadium, resigned from the design jury before Friday’s announcement, The New York Times reported. He said he opposed all six designs.

RMJM’s design has been dubbed “the corn on the cob” in various media, including in St. Petersburg-based online newspaper Fontanka.ru, which has strongly criticized the project.

As the decision was announced, a boat with a banner reading “Durdom City,” or “Madhouse City,” floated past Gazprom’s building on the Neva River.

Six protesters — one for each of the six designs — stood on the boat, dressed as patients from a mental health institute.

Wearing signs that said, “A high rise tower for every idiot,” and “A tower for every fool,” the protesters got off the boat, walked to a waiting vehicle, apparently an ambulance, and drove off.

“It is illegal,” said Vladimir Popov, head of the St. Petersburg Union of Architects, adding that no one had authorized the contest. “You can’t construct that kind of building in St. Petersburg.”

St. Petersburg lawmakers Mikhail Amosov, Natalya Yevdokimova and Sergei Gulyayev sent a protest to the General Prosecutor’s Office, asking that the legitimacy of the contest and the deal between the city and Gazprom be investigated.

The city government has agreed to spend 60 billion rubles ($2.3 billion) on building Gazprom-City, using up to half of the tax revenues that it will receive from the company over the next 10 years.

Mikhail Piotrovsky, the director of the Hermitage Museum, has been among the most strident critics of the project. “Visitors get pleasure from the unique aura of St. Petersburg. ... If we destroy its aura, we will lose the economic foundation for our future existence,” Piotrovsky wrote in a comment last month for Vedomosti.

“In this part of town, the maximum height of buildings set by the local law is 48 meters but almost all projects that made it to the final of the competition go beyond this limitation,” Amosov said.

A Gazprom spokesman denied this was the case. “The television tower is 311 meters, and it isn’t visible from all parts of the city,” he said.

Supporters of the project have compared the furor to the reaction in Paris when the Eiffel Tower was built in 1889. Amosov, who heads the City Planning Commission at the St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly said his commission had already received a series of mass complaints about the plan including a joint protest signed by 950 residents of the Krasnogvardeisky district, close to the planned construction site.

Tony Kettle, managing director of RMJM in Britain, and lead architect on the project, told the Financial Times: “When you consider Paris, a city with an equally precious environment, it has been made even more special by the 324-meter high Eiffel Tower.”