To the Finland Station

St Petersburg, unlike Moscow, seems initially to make some sense. While we're there, I.T, when not marvelling at the pipes, refers to it as 'a dream of Europe', and that sounds about right - all the features of the European bourgeois city accentuated by an absolutist monarchy, on a hugely impressive scale, to an extent which no city to the west of it can actually emulate. It's an extremely well-preserved, low-rise city, but not in the usual Poujadist sense - it might be brightly coloured and covered in classical and art nouveau detail, but it's neither cutesy nor picturesque. It's more like a strange absolutist version of Scandinavia which somehow seemed to only employ extremely talented architects. Everyone knows about this side of St Petersburg, and so this post - surprise surprise - focuses on the Soviet avant-garde architecture of the first 15 years after the revolution, which sometimes blends with and sometimes ruptures the general elegance and the slightly sinister serenity.

The latter is only slightly disrupted by cack like the above, but may soon be disrupted rather more cataclysmically by RMJM's Gazprom Tower, which will loom over the city in a manner not envisaged since the Monument to the Third International. It's an awful idea, not so much because of the idea of a tower, any tower - there is an Eiffel-like spindly steel telecommunications tower in Petersburg which fits into the city nicely, and in fact the city authorities have been unsubtly illuminating it at night, as if to say 'look! we have a skyscraper already!' No, the Gazprom tower is malign because of its sheer identikit crapness, and its embodiment of the intertwining of state and corporate power. And when even Norman Foster walks out of an architectural competition on a matter of principle - as he did from his place in the Gazprom judging panel - you know something dodgy is going on. Meanwhile, the sheer illiteracy of the new architecture we do find in Petersburg appears to prove that a city providing daily exposure to some of the world's finest architecture has little effect on the quality of its architects. Anyway, this Leningrad account is divided, for reasons of arbitrary convenience, into two posts according to different sides of the Neva - the next, when and if I get time, will be on the centre and the Narvskaya district.

Vasilevsky Island

Vasilievsky Island was a working class area developed around the shipyards and docks, and the attendant industries. One of the most striking things about Petrograd is how industrial it still is, how dense and modern (providing, here, that modernity stops sometime in 1925). This all nuances a bit the regularly made claim - on right and left - that in 1917 the Russian Empire was a peasant country. Of course it was, but combined and uneven development is still very apparent to the casual visitor - in 1917, this must have felt like one of the most modern cities in the world. This area - fairly far from the centre - is full of tall, art nouveau blocks of flats, whose elegance conceals shabby courtyards full of giant, lethal lumps of ice and filth.

I was here on a Constructivist tip-off from Avvakum, of Chto Delat, told that if I progressed for 20 minutes along this road I would find many things. The elegant housing above runs along numbered, un-named streets, the projected sites of unbuilt canals, which then give way very suddenly, to an area of new construction. Here, some sort of elitny Karl-Marx-Hof is being hewn out of beton brut. When it's finished it will be dressed in stone along the lines of the following, which are as I recall called 'Financier Apartments', and strangely evoke the modular, stretched-classical New York architecture of circa 1917, albeit in the clumsiest, cheapest manner.

These towers stand in front of the Kirov Palace of Culture, designed by Noi Trotsky (noi relation). Palaces of Culture succeeded Workers' Clubs in Party nomenclature at the end of the '20s, not accidentally. The Kirov Palace is one of many buildings in Leningrad named after the assassinated local party boss, who had been proved to be considerably more popular than Stalin in the elections to the 1934 Party Congress - the chutzpah of immortalising someone you have had killed is impressive. This building dates from the very year Kirov was murdered, and is the exact midpoint between Constructivism and Stalinist neoclassicism. In fact, Petersburg seems to have had many examples of this style, refusing to follow Moscow into full-blown delirious kitsch, retaining its rectitude, except at the periphery, in the aptly named Moskovsky District, the city's southern entrance, a parade of giant streets, massive neoclassical housing complexes and yawning ceremonial plazas. So here, at the back, we have Modernism:

And at the front, we have Modernism dressed-up, encased in rustication, smothered in detail - but you can still recognise this as Modernism - and the asymmetrical massing and Suprematist interlocking planes make it a recognisably Soviet modernism. It is also quite vast, surrounded by large spaces which seem neither park nor square, with the tacked-on stone crumbling and some of the windows boarded-up. Still, by Constructivist standards this is pretty spruce, and the redness of the stone seems rather apt...

Across the green/square thing is a Constructivist Factory Kitchen, one of three designed c1930 by a group of ASNOVA architects, including Iosif Meerzon, who was one of the four designers (along with Tatlin himself) of the Monument to the Third International. Jameson notes somewhere that collective eating facilities are one of the most important components of any serious utopia, you know.

In Richard Pare's monumental Soviet Modernism In Ruins book The Lost Vanguard, he finds this building completely stripped, with straw reinforcement sticking out of the steel struts, with a group of homeless Petersburgers sitting round a bonfire made out of the building's remains. One of these pictures re-appears in my first book. So in a sense it's pleasing to see that it hasn't actually fallen down, but has been put back together to some extent...

Although needless to say, this has not been done with a great deal of historical scupulousness. The restoration of the actual building isn't too awful, but one wing of it has been given the metal screen you can see above - which promises a 'Fashion Gallery' (in English) inside. On asking, it turns out a Fashion Gallery is a shopping mall. It's funny - as in, both depressing and ironic - to see a device like this used here. These metallic skeins were used by high-tech architects in the '80s who were utterly in hock to Russian Constructivism - and now they're used to encase one of the very few actual Russian Constructivist buildings left. Of all the architects they were in the deepest hock to, of course, the foremost was the 'Soviet Piranesi', Iakov Chernikhov. He has a building just round the corner...

Most books about Chernikhov note that, while he was working on the astonishing Architectural Fantasies, he was designing several industrial buildings. The only one of these to my knowledge that has been positively identified is this, and one of his dynamic drawings of it survives. It's a factory just next to the docks on the Neva, and is the other side of Piranesi - those images of noble buildings overcome by various kinds of vegetation. Here, it looks like one of HG Wells' Martian tripods beached on the Neva after catching cold, with its eyes boarded up, with a quiff of green weeds on its head. The sign says 'For Sale'.

Across from here are the Neva cranes, the cranes which inspired Tatlin to create the spindly monument in the first place. Here, they frame the icebreaker Krasin, its hammer & sickle proudly displayed.

Also retaining its Communist insignia is the Mining Institute, one of the city's neoclassical showpieces, designed in 1811 by serf-turned-architect Andrey Voronikhin. I can't work out if the preservation of the symbols is because the Russian CP have influence here, or for sentimental reasons, or for reasons of nationalism, or out of simple inertia. I can't deny a slight thrill at seeing it though, and the similarly indefensible rush at seeing unironic Lenin monuments everywhere.

Petrogradsky District

Petrograd might well be the political name-of-choice for this city; while St Petersburg evokes autocracy and post-91 restoration triumphalism and Leningrad Stalinist leader idolatory, Petrograd - the name from 1914 to 1924 - summons up images of the Petrograd Soviet, the city that called itself 'Petrocommune' during the Russian Civil War, and perhaps the city that rebelled again in 1921. The Petrograd district itself, meanwhile, is a mostly art nouveau/eclectic thing rather than neoclassical, although it meets the Neva with the building above - the Collective House of the Society of Former Political Exiles, built at the turn of the '30s in Gropius-in-granite style, and in very good nick. Few of these Former Political Exiles - often Old Bolsheviks, anarchists, Mensheviks, SRs - would survive the '30s, but that such a building would even be erected that late shows how slow full Stalinism was in coming.

The October revolution emerged from some strange places. The building above is the Kshesinskaya Mansion, designed for a ballerina in the Imperial Ballet, by A. Gauguin in 1904-6 - a particularly gorgeous iron & glass jugendstil confection that just happened to be the headquarters of the Bolsheviks throughout 1917. It subsequently became the Museum of the Revolution, and now rejigs its collection in a strange half-critical, half-not fashion. If you look at the exhibits here in the wrong order, the museum's staff of formidable babushkas will scold you without mercy. Until recently, the Museum had on display a large collection of 'revolutionary porcelain' from the early '20s, which is being replaced with an exhibit on Putin. Other rooms are given over to bizarre assemblages of toys and tickets, a political museum as cargo cult.

Opposite is the tellingly named 'Railway Transportation Academy Named after Comrade Stalin', designed by G.A Simonov in 1931 - a projecting front and a long curve round the back. It's another instance of Petersburg's domestication of Constructivism, leaving it close to a kind of Scandinavian modernised classicism. Not that all the pre-revolutionary buildings here are so sober.

Like this Tsarist-era Mosque, combining thick, tactile rustication and obsessively complex detail, in a similar manner to the Moscow buildings of the 1930s. Completing this square is a Metro station named after Maxim Gorky, recently restructured as a revanchist spacecraft.

The boulevard occasionally pauses for gigantic ensembles of things like this:

There's a fair amount in the Petrogradsky District like the above. What is perhaps more interesting than the facades - some of which are very, very pretty - is what happens at the back - an artist-activist named Dimitri gives us a tour through them, a reminder that the city's surface beauty is superficial in the extreme.

As much rent as possible is squeezed out of the spaces, with long systems of courtyards within courtyards, random lumps of ice, the ubiquitous broken pipes, and gigantic cracks running down the buildings. Most of them have glass lifts installed, which were apparently bolted on in the 1970s. They're cage lifts, not especially salubrious, but they have an element of Constructivist dash about them, the affixing of fearlessly modern components onto the old - think of all those '30s LCC blocks with pitched-roof brick lift towers added in the '80s, and how much cooler Leningrad's glass lifts are in comparison.

Up the road a fair bit from here is the Lensoviet Palace of Culture, another building that began Constructivist and ended up a strange melange, with plate glass walls and assymetries smothered in sculpture and stone. It's a very worthwhile accidental style, this, a forgotten form of imposing, compromised modernism maybe more akin to Auguste Perret or the Portland stone-modern of the '40s in the UK than the full-blown Stalinist fantasias you find in Moscow - there's a dialectical standoff between the openness and irregularity of the original plans and the sombre rustication they're wrapped in.

The finest example of this inadvertent style - Postconstructivism is what it's called round here - is the Collective House for Workers at the Lensoviet Palace of Culture, designed by E.A Levinsohn and Igor Fomin in 1931, finished 4 years later. The model looks like something by Lubetkin, all playful games with canopies, pilotis and curves, but the finished building is defined by a mix of granite and concrete (now spalling) which makes its games feel more Kafkaesque. Regardless, the writer who actually guards it is Nikolai Gogol.

In front of it, an expressionist lump of ice suggests a mini-Caspar David Friedrich.

The space inside the housing scheme is full of strangeness, with proper Constructivist ramps jutting out of it, and a pavilion at the back which is randomly bashed-up, with varying kinds of political and/our puerile graffiti all over it.

Next to it, a more straightforwardly Constructivist office building - originally going by the very sexy name Lenpolygrafmash - seems impossibly light and cheerful by comparison with all this murkiness.

Another, fairly astonishing Postconstructivist scheme is the Svirstroy Housing Complex, finished as late as 1938, in bare concrete and red render, with a notably un-Stalinist simplicity, but with lots of highly un-Constructivist fluting. Here though, symmetry has prevailed, affected only slightly by the glass infilling of balconies indulged in by several residents - something done, I'm told, in order to create a free second refrigerator.

Yet, at the corner of each of the building's wings there's a little abstract sculpture, a remnant of Lipschitz or Gabo, stuck onto it. The book I have on this is in Russian, and offers no clues as far as I can see to the identity of the sculptor. Finding public abstract art as late as 1938 is a bit of a shocker, though, for anyone who wants to make sharp demarcations between Constructivism and Stalinism...

Meanwhile, the glazed stairwells are as modernist as anyone could want, the staircases visible alongside the air-conditioning units bolted-on by those who can afford it.

A mile or two from here is a red-brick industrial district of cotton mills and workers' housing, a fairly accurate reproduction of Ancoats, only with much taller houses. Even here, some of the Mills have been Urban Splashed - in this row, some are derelict, some are loft conversions. One of the mills has a little plaque outlining how the workers won some sort of award for heroic socialist labour in the mid-1960s...

Although it isn't as inadvertently peculiar as this monument to children who died in the October revolution. I had thought the unusual thing about the October revolution was that nobody died in it (most unlike the civil war that followed) - but apparently there was just a lack of a monument to children which needed to be filled. Anyway, there's one main reason why anyone would come here for architecture...

Erich Mendelsohn's Red Banner Textile Factory is merely one part of a giant Mancunian cotton complex, but it's from an entirely different planet to the rest. It's oft-forgotten that the USSR invited projects in the '20s from the most famous Modernist architects - and while schemes by Marcel Breuer, Gropius, Perret, Poelzig, Lurcat and many others came to little (although Bruno Taut, Ernst May and Albert Kahn all had things here, hidden in the closed industrial towns and waiting for their documenter), there are two enormous buildings by major architects in each capital - one in each, specifically, with Corbusier's Centrosoyus in Moscow the other one. Mendelsohn had the job taken away from him mid-way through construction in 1926, but the boilerhouse was completed entirely to his design - one of Mendelsohn's cruisers, a giant ship of red and yellow hurtling somewhere indefinable, far more massive than it looks in photographs. Even then, it's part of a larger entity:

A classically Fordist grid-like daylight factory surrounds the boilerhouse, now partly derelict, partly turned over to various ad hoc light industries - but those hanging around here don't seem especially surprised to see a fleet of English-speaking people with cameras descending upon it, and the possibility of it becoming an art space is apparently not unlikely. Graffiti nearby advertises alterglobalist.com.ru, a site which no longer seems to exist.

However - credit where it's due - just adjacent to the Red Banner factory is a decent new building, a moderate modernist Jewish Cultural Centre of some description, which somehow managed to get built without explicit historical references or 'gob-ons' of any sort, although the brick and angularity gesture both at the Victorian and Constructivist architecture of the area.

But very nearby, there's a lot of this:

And here, you get to ask yourself which is crumbling into ruination more interestingly - pomo canalside apartment block built less than ten years ago, or modernist factory building built 80 years ago. There's some truly horrible new housing round here, but mostly I'll spare your blushes. Oh, all right. Here's one:

Along the canal are various locks left by lovers, for good luck. This one might be a nationalist love-lock, were it not for the lovely shade of pink.

To the Station!

Finally, the stretch of river that leads, if you follow it round a vague loop, past the cruiser Aurora and some Putindromes, to the Finland Station. The most fun thing to do here was watch the Navy in training for the 65th anniversary celebrations of the end of the Great Patriotic War. I was in a quandary about whether to tell the number '3' that his number was upside down, before he got noticed and chastised by the inspector.

The Finland Station is a lovely building, a crisp, sharp piece of mid-century modern, the first major building after the death of Stalin; it could easily have been built in '50s Sweden instead, and proof that eastern Bloc railway stations are invariably beautiful, at least when unencumbered by grime and ads. The station sits at the foot of a monument to Lenin, for, in this instance, fairly self-explanatory reasons - and another early compromise, where an abstract, suprematist base was surmounted by a realistic, gesticulating statue. Lenin isn't there now, but this isn't for political reasons. Apparently, a Mafia don driving past the square aimed a bazooka at Lenin, and successfully managed to blow up his arse.

The monument underneath is shielded by wood, while Lenin's arse is put back together.

Thanks to Thomas Campbell for invaluable assistance in finding this stuff.