The following is an (uncomfirmed) report that we just received regarding the boycott of RMJM's selection for the Gazprom City competition... Read Report | Previously 2 3

* This story will be appearing in this week's issue of BD
Norman Foster and Rafael Vinoly walked off the jury that chose RMJM's designs for the massive Gazprom City development in St Petersburg.

The two stars joined Japanese architect Kisho Kurokawa in boycotting the competition, leaving just one architect on the nine-strong jury.

The refused to disclose their reasons for leaving, but Vinoly denied suggestions they had been pressured to select RMJM as winner following the practice's success in a public vote.

RMJM, the only UK practice on the shortlist, was a surprise winner, beating off competition from international stars Jean Nouvel, Massimiliano Fuksas, Herzog & de Meuron, Rem Koolhaas and Daniel Libeskind.

"Mr Foster, Mr Kurokawa and myself retired from the jury before it convened," said Vinoly. "We were asked to go to St Petersburg on Friday to meet with the governor [of St Petersburg and member of the jury Valentina Matviyenko] and discuss with her our concerns and suggestions for moving forward in a much more productive manner. We did but unfortunately the meeting did not take place."

Foster's office confirmed that he had left the jury but declined to comment further.

Kurokawa has been more open about his reasons for leaving - he publicly stated his opposition to all six of the shortlisted designs because of their height and his belief that St Petersburg should preserve its low scale cityscape. He told the New York Times that the city's current limit on building heights was "the most sensitive issue to keeping the existing cultural value of the old city centre".

The competition for the headquarters of one of the world's largest energy companies has already attracted massive controversy, with public protests in St Petersburg and a boycott organised by the Russian Union of Architects. RMJM's winning design, dubbed "the corn on the cob", would rise to 1,299 feet, dwarfing all other buildings in the historic city. Russia's leaders believe it will make a bold statement about St Petersburg's determination to become an economic powerhouse rather than simply a tourist attraction - Russian President Vladimir Putin hails from St Petersburg and has been closely involved in the cosmpetition.




ALSO, FROM BLOOMBERG TODAY...

Gazprom Tower Will Blight St. Petersburg Skyline: Colin Amery
By Colin Amery

Dec. 7 (Bloomberg) -- St. Petersburg is one of the world's most beautiful cities. Its rare qualities come from the survival of two elements: the planned center with its palaces and canals and the ring of Czarist parks and grounds encircling the city.

With the collapse of communism and the rise of the new Russia, the city is changing radically. This week's unveiling of the new designs for the towering Gazprom City, after a brief international architectural competition, show the imposition of a Western corporate vision that bears no relation to the architectural values underpinning the historic city.

The proposed site of the new ensemble for OAO Gazprom, Russia's state-controlled energy company, is close to the River Neva, opposite Smolny Cathedral and the convent designed for the daughter of Peter the Great by Bartolomeo Rastrelli (1700-1771), one of St. Petersburg's best baroque architects.

There were six finalists in the competition and all of them included a giant office tower in their proposals. None of the architects were Russian -- the six were Jean Nouvel of Paris; Massimiliano Fuksas of Rome; Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron of Switzerland; Rem Koolhaas of the Netherlands; Daniel Libeskind of Berlin and RMJM from London. The winning design, selected after public exhibitions and a lengthy jury debate, is a 396-meter-high spiral tower by RMJM, the British firm.

A furious response followed, led by the St. Petersburg Union of Architects, which refused to play any part in the selection process. Yury Sdobnov, vice-president of the Russian Union of Architects, called the winning design "blasphemous.'' The Japanese architect Kisho Kurokawa resigned from the jury because he felt that none of the six proposals was right for the city.

Skyline Precedent

Professor Mikhail Piotrovsky, the director of the Hermitage Museum, opposes the project, pointing out that the maximum height of buildings established by local law is 48 meters. In London, he recently spoke about the terrible precedent this tower will set, if it is built, for the future skyline of the city.

Piotrovsky and other objectors including film director Alexander Sokurov and rock musician Yury Shevchuk aren't opposed to new developments that will benefit the city economy. Yet they see no point in St. Petersburg sacrificing the unique beauty that visitors come to see. Ninety percent of visitors to the exhibition of the proposals were against erecting towers in the city and the general feeling is that Gazprom's tower will be the start of a skyline more suited to Dubai or Shanghai than St. Petersburg.

RMJM's international style has just won the firm another competition to build a spiraling tower in Moscow -- the 46-story City Palace Tower -- and it has other giant projects on the drawing board for China, India, Qatar, and a new satellite city for 800,000 outside Cairo.

Routine Modernism

All the firm's work is stylistically similar -- a kind of routine, rather old-fashioned commercial modernism. It is sad that the city of St. Petersburg's enthusiasm for the offices of the world's largest natural-gas producer could mean the abandonment of the careful regulations that make the city so agreeable and unlike other cities.

It should be possible to build new commercial environments that are in scale with the older city and respect its skyline. The city is willing to spend some 60 billion rubles ($2.3 billion) on building Gazprom City -- money from the tax revenue it will receive over the next 10 years.

None of this money is being spent on the bad housing that many St. Petersburg residents have endured since Soviet times, nor on preserving many of the vulnerable historic buildings within the city. The debate is just beginning.

Siege Suffering

No one doubts the power of Gazprom. Yet the citizens remember the influence of the famous philosopher and writer Dmitri Ligachev, who died in 1999 having survived Soviet prison camp and the Nazi siege of Leningrad. He fought to save the city from the worst expressions of Soviet power, prevented the Czarist grounds from becoming "model socialist parks,'' and wrote about St. Petersburg as a unique landscape of buildings that had to be as carefully tended as any garden.

St. Petersburg is a city with an extraordinary soul -- a soul stamped by Soviet communism and the suffering of the 900-day World War II siege, in which about 650,000 citizens starved to death.

The climate is ruthless -- long, cold dark winters -- with a brief and glorious interlude of sunshine at midnight in high summer. It's the city of Alexander Pushkin, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Leo Tolstoy and the home of outstanding music, opera and ballet at the renowned Mariinsky Theater.

Gazprom and RMJM are showing nothing but contempt and misunderstanding for the architectural legacy of a world heritage city. Their design is just another global corporate monolith -- banal, dull and inappropriate.

St. Petersburg, which has survived so much and has so much to offer, deserves better than this.

(Colin Amery is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the reporter on this story: Colin Amery at colinamery@yahoo.com