What Dallas McMansions and a Russian palace alleged to be Vladimir Putin’s have in common

When I started teaching an architecture and film class a few years ago, I couldn’t imagine how urgent the subject would be. Then came the coronavirus plague, and suddenly every interaction in our lives seemed to be conveyed through screens, and the idea of ​​work and the city in the zoom era was something we all had to grapple with.

And then came last month when architectural documentation – typically the rather esoteric stuff of public service broadcasting – sparked a national reckoning with a ruthless authoritarian regime.

This film is Putin’s Palace, a revelation of the Versailles-scale estate that Russian President Vladimir Putin allegedly built for himself on the Black Sea. Produced and narrated by Alexei Navalny, the now imprisoned activist and opposition leader, the film lasts almost two hours and has been viewed more than 106 million times on YouTube – almost certainly a record for any architectural film.

His release, coupled with Navalny’s imprisonment, brought countless thousands of protesters to the streets across Russia, staggering from the economic crisis, pandemic and a general loss of confidence in Vladimir Putin’s kleptocratic leadership.

In the film, architecture is the literal as well as the symbolic epitome of Putin’s corruption and lust for power. While his country suffers, the Russian president is reportedly building a $ 1.3 billion housing estate on an estate that Navalny, with mischievous humor, describes as 39 times the size of Monaco. “Vladimir Putin considers himself to be the Russian emperor and behaves accordingly,” says Navalny, describing him as pathologically “obsessed with wealth and luxury”.

In response to the film, Putin denied he owned the palace and Russian petrochemical oligarch (and Putin’s ally) Arkady Rotenberg claimed to be the client of the project. But the film makes it hard to believe that it was created for and by nobody but the Russian President.

Located outside the coastal town of Gelendzhik, it’s almost comically lavish, a virtual seaside Kremlin surrounded by vineyards and protected by several layers of security, including a no-fly zone over the sea. According to the film, it has its own church, a sculpture garden, a boulevard lined with rare trees, an arboretum (with 40 gardeners to look after it), an amphitheater, an underground hockey field (Navalny: “Who needs a palace in what can’t you play hockey ? ”, An amphitheater, a guest house that can be reached via a 60-meter-long bridge, a power plant, staff dormitories, an operations center, two helicopter landing pads and its own gas station.

And then there is the palace itself, a colossus of almost 200,000 square meters. Its designer is Lanfranco Cirillo, an Italian architect who worked with Russian petrochemical managers in the 1990s and rose in the oligarchic food chain until he reached Putin himself. “We sold a way of life more than architecture,” he said in an interview with Radio Free Europe in 2015. “There is a big difference between an expensive house and a stylish, elegant house.”

The model, if there is one, is the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, the imperial residential complex of the Russian tsars and today the Hermitage. It too, and perhaps not by chance, was largely designed by an imported Italian architect, Bartolomeo Rastrelli, who was able to bring the cultured taste of the script of classical architecture to the Russian Empire.

It’s worth noting that the same impulse that arose from uncertainty and ambition is the reason that European architects like Renzo Piano and Santiago Calatrava are so successful in the United States, and Dallas in particular. The gentle Genoese accent of piano, for example, certainly sounds “more noble” than, for example, the Bronx-colored diction of Peter Bohlin – one of the most respected architects of this nation – whose company Bohlin Cywinski Jackson is headquartered in the unromantic Wilkes-Barre, Pa. Has .

The Winter Palace in St. Petersburg is now part of the renowned State Hermitage.
(Photos by Tom Waseleski – Gazette)

But Cirillo is no Rastrelli, and so the palace mimics the size and grandeur of the Hermitage, but it lacks the essential dignity of the original, its sense of imperial grandeur. It’s a McMansion scaled to a palatial level indeed, with the kind of amenities you’d find in an upscale suburban development in North Dallas: indoor pool, home theater, gym, bar, storage space galore.

There are also more ambitious elements in the film, such as those found in a Las Vegas hotel: a casino, a shisha bar (with a stripper pole), an “aqua disco”, a real theater with private boxes. The bedroom is the size of a large apartment, with its own living room “to rest before resting,” jokes Navalny, who was sentenced to more than two years in prison last week for violating probation conditions.

In addition to the kitschy detailing and construction, the main difference between the palace and its historical models is conceptual. The great palaces were not just residences, they were public expressions of an all-encompassing philosophical framework that reflected the monarch’s god-like presence throughout the physical and intellectual space of the empire.

The point of the endless enfilade (row of lined up rooms) in Versailles and the Cartesian formal gardens stretching out into the distance was not just to be “classic”, but to translate this philosophy into a three-dimensional universe. The palace does not seem to have such metaphysical claims. It is a bureaucrat’s vision of a palace, not a monarch’s. There is no principle of organization beyond the accumulation of luxury and the provision of material comfort. The avenue of trees is just an avenue of trees. It’s going nowhere and means nothing except that Putin supposedly has the power to conjure it up.

In America we have no imperial palaces; Power rests with the people and is represented by the architecture of our democratic institutions, of which the Capitol is best known. And so we have an unexpected reversal: in Russia, protesters rally against an autocrat and for democratic reform through the architecture, and in America an angry mob is attacking, spurred on by a leader hoping to turn a democratic process on its head, to be precise the architecture that symbolizes this form of government.

That attack on American democracy has failed, and former President Donald Trump has now settled in his own seaside mansion, Mar-a-Lago. A National Historic Landmark, it was designed in the Roaring ’20s for heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post with 58 bedrooms on 17 acres, making it one of the largest private residences in the country.

Trump is famous for his own gilded style, of course, but nothing is secret about his oceanfront property. At the right price, you have access to it. There is actually a waiting list to join Mar-a-Lago. Sumptuous luxury is Trump’s brand, and his empire is built on his ability to market that sensibility in products that range from condos to steaks to educational institutions. And here there is a difference between Russian culture, where even the thought of achieving such material extravagance was historically unthinkable, and that clearly American view of the world, in which it is seen as a desirable and achievable goal.

What Putin and Trump share is the belief that Wall Street believes that “greed is good,” or at least is good for them. It is this essential principle that defines their architecture. It’s stylistically agnostic, so to speak – neoclassical, baroque, Moorish, modern – it doesn’t matter as long as it’s bombastic, an exercise in self-exaltation. Call it authoritarian chic.

When I saw Navalny’s documentary, I remembered a work of Russian architecture that, in its modesty, humor, and genuine interest in the architectural history of this country, is practically the opposite of the palace.

The Vodka Ceremony Pavilion (2003) by Russian architect Alexander Brodsky in the Moscow suburb of Klyazma in Russia. It consists of reclaimed windows from a demolished factory. (Markus Lamber)

Located in a settlement on the outskirts of Moscow, it is a small, whitewashed building made entirely of reconditioned windows from a demolished 19th century factory. It’s bright inside, with small openings that overlook a birch forest. It was designed by architect Alexander Brodsky with a single purpose: a ceremonial pavilion for drinking vodka.

It’s nice to think there is such a building in these times. Even if I would like to visit it a little too often for my own good.

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