Kirov leap into future floors old guard
FROM ALICE LAGNADO for The Times


RUSSIA’S Kirov Ballet is to get modern new premises that will alter the pre-Revolutionary architectural landscape of the former Imperial capital of St Petersburg.
St Petersburg, which was founded by Peter the Great in 1703 and built on a grand scale, guards its tumbledown Russian Baroque appearance jealously.

But Valeri Gergiev, artistic director of the Mariinsky Theatre, the name by which the Kirov is known in Russia, has returned the company to its prime position on the Russian cultural scene and is determined to bring the city a splash of modernity with two bold new glass, granite and brick theatres.

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<small>[ 18 January 2003, 03:48 AM: Message edited by: Stuart Sweeney ]</small>

<BR><small>St. Petersburg's Mariinsky Theater</small><P><B>American Architect's Plan for Renovating St. Petersburg's Mariinsky Theater Stirs Controversy in Russia</B><BR>Maya Pritsker for Andante<BR> <BR> <BR>The Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg, built by Alberto Kavos in 1860, is in desperate need of renovation. The ballet and opera company, which employs two thousand people and recently established an Academy for Young Singers and a Youth Orchestra, requires a second and possibly third stage, additional rehearsal space and new technology. The theater needs money for its ongoing operations, and the city of St. Petersburg has an urgent need for revenue, which could be brought in by the tourism industry if its infrastructure were better developed. Perhaps most importantly, the city, which was created almost three hundred years ago and yet has not changed much since the 18th century, needs new ideas to bring it into the 21st.<P><A HREF="http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/020226/cgtu009_1.html" TARGET=_blank><B>click for more</B></A><BR>

<B>'Rubbish bags' outrage St Petersburg</B> <BR>The Kremlin steps in to quell the storm over radical plans for a new opera house and arts complex. News article by Ian Traynor in St Petersburg from The Guardian<P><BR>There are few finer or sadder sights in Europe than St Petersburg, a city centre where the elegant skyline has barely changed in 200 years, but whose 3,000 stuccoed palaces, baroque churches, and imperial terraces are collapsing from decades of neglect. <BR>"St Petersburg died at the start of the 20th century. All the new building work went to Moscow and we were left in peace," Lyudmila Likhacheva, of the city's urban planning committee, said. <P>The result is a crumbling period piece unmatched in Europe, an entire city core that would be recognised by 19th century tsars sitting in the Winter Palace. <P>But a 15-minute stroll along the canals from the former seat of the tsars, an architectural revolution is being plotted within the walls of the Mariinsky theatre, home of the Kirov opera and ballet under the mercurial genius of Valery Gergiyev.<P><A HREF="http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,686759,00.html" TARGET=_blank><B>click for more</B></A><BR>

Curtain Up on Mariinsky Design Contest
By Galina Stolyarova for The St Petersburg Times

The architectural make-up of St. Petersburg's historic center has barely changed over the last 150 years. But its ensemble of imperial palaces and baroque mansions, many in a desperate state of repair, will soon be joined by a grandiose arts complex that would radically alter the status quo.

Culture Minister Mikhail Shvydkoi on Wednesday announced the official opening of an international competition to find the architect to design the Mariinsky Theater's new building. According to Shvydkoi, the federal government intends to spend at least $100 million on constructing the new opera house.

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Design Contest Opens for New Mariinsky
By Irina Titova (The Associated Press)

ST. PETERSBURG -- Eleven designs for a new $100 million building for St. Petersburg's famed Mariinsky Opera and Ballet Theater went on display this week -- threatening to add a modern touch to a city resistant to change.

Among the entries displayed for public judgment were a glass creation by U.S. architect Eric Owen Moss derided as a "garbage bag" and a sarcophagus-like construction by French architect Dominique Perraut, as well as more conservative designs by Russian architects.

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Theatre of the absurd
Desecration of skyline feared. By Nick Paton Walsh for The Guardian.


Is it to be the rubbish bags, the giant angel hand, or a warped grand piano?
This is the question facing a jury of aesthetes choosing a design for one of the world's most prestigious theatres.

This week the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg unveiled entries in its competition for a new building. Eleven architects have each been paid £20,000 to come up with an idea, regardless of whether it is built.

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The decision has been announced and here is the initial coverage. I have to say that the illustration does not seem inspiring:

Gold-Colored Glass to Cloak Mariinsky
By Konstantin Trifonov for Reuters


ST. PETERSBURG -- French architect Dominique Perrault won an international contest Saturday to modernize the 19th-century Mariinsky Theater with a giant glass and marble cocoon.

Perrault, creator of the glass-and-steel National Library in Paris, led one of 11 teams taking part in a competition to design the first major work of modern architecture to be built in the imperial capital.

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Glass net for top Russian theatre
By Sarah Rainsford, BBC correspondent, Moscow

A bold French design has been chosen by an international panel of judges as a new home for Russia's Mariinsky Theatre.
The design will create a big open space for opera

The St Petersburg company, better known in the West as the Kirov, has long outgrown its current imperial building, where its directors complain their creativity is being stifled.

The Russian authorities invited proposals for a new design from all over the world, but the jury's final choice is proving controversial.

It has been described as a golden sarcophagus. Those more charitably inclined call it a cocoon.

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News on a new design for the Marinsky theatre. From The Independent.

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Giant glass cocoon set to descend on home of the Kirov
By Konstantin Trifonov in St Petersburg for The Independent

A French architect has won an international contest to modernise St Petersburg's 19th-century Mariinsky Theatre, once the Kirov, with a giant glass and marble cocoon.

Dominique Perrault, creator of the glass-and-steel National Library in Paris, led one of 11 teams taking part in a competition to design the first big work of modern architecture to be built in Russia's imperial capital.

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Amendments to Mariinsky 2 Design Approved
By Galina Stolyarova for The St Petersburg Times

One of several disputes swirling around French architect Dominique Perrault's design for a second building for Mariinsky Theater artists ended Friday when the city's architecture committee approved changes to the design.

Perrault won an international competition to design the building in July 2003, but the federal government has been in no rush to get things started as debates over the design's costs and artistic merit rage.

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Mariinsky reloaded
By Paul Abelsky for THE ST. PETERSBURG TIMES


The imminent demolition of the House of Culture of the First Five Year Plan will initiate the city's most ambitious architectural project in recent memory.

The gray Soviet-era monolith will make way for the a new Mariinsky Theater building, a daring extravaganza of color and form conceived by renowned French architect Dominique Perrault.

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