Downtown Saint Petersburg is street after street of extravagant mansions, tenement buildings and palaces built at the height of the Russian empire. Not all have managed to maintain their splendour since that golden era, however – though you might say there’s something romantic about the gentle sense of decay.
If St Petersburg’s history as Russia’s cultural capital is etched out in its architecture, over time, many of those etchings have become faded: its mansions and palaces have been turned into hotels or condominiums; others have fallen into disuse and disrepair. Approximately 15,000 buildings date to before 1914 and most of them badly need renovation.
The state hasn’t been the one to answer that call.
“It happened at the time when Dmitry Medvedev
was president – the economy and quality of life were growing,” says
Alexander Basalygin, founder of the BS Art Development. There was a
growing demand, he said, “for a new life of aesthetics – and public
spaces in particular”.
Two years ago his group, a collective of artists, rented one of St Petersburg’s crumbling mansions – and they weren’t the only ones to do so. Between 2013 and 2016, around 20 new art-oriented spaces opened in St Petersburg each year, from galleries and private museums to co-working spaces. Now there are upwards of 200 creative spaces in the city, located in everything from former palaces to old Soviet warehouses. Collectively, St Petersburg’s artists have taken it upon themselves to save its historic buildings, one at a time.
The mansion adopted by Basalygin’s group is an 18th-century manor on the Fontanka river that was once home to the Golitsyns, a family of Russian nobles. For years it had been abandoned and decayed, despite being the meeting point of the well-known Arzamas literary society in the 19th century. The BS group renovated the building, subdivided it, added facilities and renamed it the Golitsyn Loft.
“Four years ago I had a dream about this place. When we came to inspect it, I realised that my dream came true,” says Oksana Kazakova, who runs the ID39 beauty space, one of the new tenants. “We saved the plasterwork, chimney, antique doors as best we could – though we had to sell our car to finish it.”
At 7,000 sq m, Golitsyn Loft’s five buildings form the largest creative space in the city. It has become a thriving hub of creativity, filled with designer showrooms, bars, architectural studios, barber shops, tattoo studios and poetry workshops.
Just 10 minutes from Golitsyn is a three-storey building on Bolshaya Konushennaya street, built in the art nouveau style. Its intricately carved ceilings were falling apart in 2015 when Tsarchitektor, a youth-oriented arts group, moved in. The building now holds bars, secondhand shops, and pottery and jewellery workshops. Nearby is Palma, another multi-use building with architect and design studios and rehearsal rooms, formerly home to German craftsmen in the 18th and 19th centuries and a mass of cheap dormitories, a gym, a chess club and a ballroom that lay ruined after the second world war.
While the Palma was bought by private investors, many of the renovations have been paid for through public fundraisers.
After a fire in 2002 destroyed much of the Annenkirche, an 18th-century Lutheran church on the Neva River, the building was abandoned to trees and rot. But in 2014 a group of young artists held an exhibition in its crumbling interior, and wanted to do more.
The money to bring the building up to basic standards is cobbled together from theatrical performances and concerts. “All together we need 400-500m rubles (£5-6m), and 80% of [concert] fees we put towards the renovation project cash fund,” says the Annenkirche’s abbot, Evgeny Raskatov. “The rest of money we channel to maintain the building and make minor repairs. Unfortunately, the Lutheran church cannot assist us in that endeavour.”
These artistic clusters come and go, giving a sense of transience to this aspect of St Petersburg’s urban life. According to ITMO University, the average lifespan of artists’ spaces is just four years, due to the inevitable price hikes in property values when “building owners decide that they can take better advantage than an artistic space”, says Alexandra Nenko, a researcher at ITMO.
Nevertheless, the artists are doing more than most, including the government, to keep the city’s historic buildings alive.
“Ideas and the creation of cultural products continue to grow in importance,” Nenko says. “Creative industries need their own place ... I am sure that they will continue to absorb abandoned mansions and palaces of St Petersburg.”
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Artists? This is nothing short of communism. Why not sell them at rock bottom to venture capitalists?
I see what you did there. Language is beaut indeed.
I visited the then Leningrad in the late seventies and early eighties when post-war reconstruction was still evident. A beautiful city and hats off to those who have taken on the revitalisation of the less famous buildings. To say that you are from 'Peter' is a statement of immense pride to those born there and therein lies the dedication to save their city. I wish them well.
And crumblin` houses in London ?
I've heard Russians are hard at work breathing new life into those as well. Bloody furriners, etc.
Perhaps you mean those ones in Chiswick, Richmond and Ealing or the other kind in Chelsea?
It might be worth a mention that Basalygin claimed to have made financial contributions to pro-Russian militias in east Ukraine cca. 2015. Also, the Annenkirche is a good 600 metres away from the Neva.
I was there last year . The buildings are amazing and there are incredible things to see everywhere but the canals got to me . All built out of pink granite with little docks here and there . Brass fixtures etc . Each block cut to fit exactly - truly amazing
You can never find an oligarch when you need him.
St Pete is a beautiful city steeped in a wealth of history and is a cultural center of the country.
It is really neat to see the cell Trotsky was imprisoned in, Peter's and the Romanov's final testing places.
The palaces (especially Hermatage and Perergoff) are exquisit.
Or the restaurant where Hilter was going to have a meal after taking the city immediately before raising it to the ground - luckily he never had that meal and the city still stands.
Or Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum's childhood home before she fled the horrors of the Bolshevik revolution to come to Hollywood.
And the bus rides to catch all of the drawbridges as they open access to cruise ships and cargo vessels throughout the city
Go in June to catch the white nights - when the sun doesn't set cause your so far up north.
I wouldn't want to live there, but I'd go again to see the things I've missed!
"Or the restaurant where Hilter (sic) was going to have a meal after taking the city immediately before raising it to the ground - "
Thank God that's all he had in mind. I was afraid he was hell-bent on razing it to the ground.
proper spelling is so passe!
Apparently along with accuracy and truth, of which proper spelling is an important symptom.
It can be said that its takes Artists to save a City - they are often the first to see beauty and possibility in decay and forgotten architecture, warehouses, old railway stations, churches, etc. The sad thing is that eventually creative spaces become ''monazite'' the rents go up, the property investors move in and before you know it what was once a real studio becomes a faux studio apartment with a price tag no artist can afford. Ive seen in happen in London, and in Toronto. Artists move on, or out... and begin all over again. I hope the creative people here in St Petersburg manage to hold onto their creations for a long time.
It's happening all across America too. I spent my teens and the first half of my twenties passing through so many amazing spaces repurposed for the creation of art. It's so sad to me to see people that same age now without access to spaces like that.
The artist run music venue and art space warehouse in Denver that acted as one of its major cultural hubs for over a decade has now been bulldozed and replaced with ugly condos. DIY music venues all across NYC have shut down over the past couple years. Almost all of the art gallery warehouses here in Austin have been priced out and replaced with start-ups. It's a puzzling process to me. These are the places that brought culture to cities like these and made them desirable to live in in the first place. Then herds of people move in, price out all of that culture, replace it with tech companies and breweries and condos, and then what are you left with?
Austin feels especially soulless and culture-less lately. Of course there are always pockets of people to find. Just sad they no longer have large spaces to congregate in and have the freedom to incubate and experiment with their art the way I did.
City of black shivering holes,
Of thin, corrupted light,
Of caryatids in sullen waters
Disheveled; of exigent skyline
Whose shadows, devoutly erected,
Are ruthlessly drawn, of time
Perpetually violated; of words
Assayed through endless nights,
To each footfall pitilessly
Exposed; city as pretext
For ruin, a finely etched
Crust, the surface alive,
Incessant, staining its pale
Facades; as wilderness scarred
By allegiance, the onslaught
Of faith, the rat holes of dissent;
As unhealable wound, raw
With time’s persistent flood.
I love thee, work of Peter's hand!
I love thy stern, symmetric form;
The Neva's calm and queenly flow
Betwixt her quays of granite-stone,
With iron tracings richly wrought;
Thy nights so soft with pensive thought,
Their moonless glow, in bright obscure,
When I alone, inside my room,
Or write or read, night's lamp unlit;
The sleeping piles that clear stand out
In lonely streets, and needle bright,
That crowns the Admiralty's spire;
When, chasing far the shades of night,
In cloudless sky of golden pure,
Dawn quick usurps the pale twilight,
And brings to end her half-hour reign.
I love thy winters bleak and harsh;
Thy stirless air fast bound by frosts;
The flight of sledge o'er Neva wide,
That glows the cheeks of maidens gay.
I returned to my city that I know like my tears,
Like my veins, like childhood's swollen glands
You've come back here, so swallow at once
The cod liver oil of Leningrad's river lamps,
Recognize, right away, the brief December day,
Egg yolk commingled with ominous tar.
Petersburg! I'm not yet ready to die!
You've still got my telephone numbers.
Petersburg! I still have the addresses
Where I can call on the speech of the dead.
I live on a back staircase, and the clapper
Yanked out with flesh hits me in the temple,
And all night through I wait for precious guests,
Rattling like shackles the chains on the doors.
Artists are only interested in saving themselves
You don't know many artists I take it
Unlikely. As you said, such artists groups last four years on the average. It takes longer to raise the money to restore a place and then maintain it in good repair. They cannot do it.
Well then it's time to start training up young people in the rapidly declining skills of stonemasonry, art plasterering and stuccowork if the old palaces of Pete are to be saved. Don't ask artists, the ones I've met are too egoistic to work in a team.
Well; I had thought the Germans destroyed Leningrad in the 1940s, obviously not as badly as it seemed ?
‘Downtown St. Petersburg?’ WTF! This isn’t Los Angeles. Holy Cow.
I’ve visited Leningrad and St. Petersburg.
Beautiful.
At last the summer has arrived in St. Petersburg.
So now you may surely walk wearing
a summer coat,
a summer scarf and
a summer hat...
Until the white nights over.
It was not up to the state to answer the call. Especially, most of it, where the proprieties of the “bourgeois”. But the same “bourgeois” with their fortunes and serfs could not imagine that such houses were out of reach for most of the people, certainly also in their future, even for their families, they would be too expensive to maintain and that the future would head for a civilizations without serfs and slaves.
That they have fallen into disuse and disrepair is due to shortsightedness of their owners. The revolution happened, to remember them their blindness. It was not the way to build and the revolution made an end to abusive exploitation and more.
These houses did not suit at all modern life and economy. That the palaces have been turned into hotels is ironical, now they are shared, it was the only economical viable outcome.
Exclusive fortunes and abusive exploitation will not be the main purposes of future civilizations, sharing will be the main aim and the transformation into hotels suit already this purposes, sadly with most of the times, an out of reach price.
Modern Russia did not destroy, on the contrary, do not forget the metro of Moscow which is one the most beautiful in the world.
Here in NZ the government is pulling money away from the arts in our tertiary education institutions. It's not rated as important enough. However it's not the economists or accountant's that arrive into an area or region and breathe life into it. They are the well trained fungus that sits on top of the primary host and sucks the juice out of it before they move on to the next one. It's the artists that revive the dead and dying. It's the arts that inject life and see potential where the vision has been lost. Our successive governments have become blinded by the bullshit told to them by business and business believes it's own bullshit. Without the arts there is no business...
"Approximately 15,000 buildings date to before 1914 and most of them badly need renovation.
The state hasn’t been the one to answer that call...Between 2013 and 2016, around 20 new art-oriented spaces opened in St Petersburg each year."
At that rate it will only take 750 years to preserve them all!
It's probably a good thing. Pre-1917 Russia was an abomination. Romanticising venal, cruel people because you think their houses were pretty is frankly unforgivable. Peterhof, the Hermitage, the Winter Palace and a vast number of other relics of this obscene system are preserved for all to see. At some point you draw the line, tear the rest down and build modern planned communities with affordable housing, supermarkets, hospitals, schools, and parks all within walking distance.
Your perception of the past is decidedly unfriendly. Architecture provides cities with a shared cultural history, regardless of the tyrants who may have commissioned various monuments.
Years ago, during the Soviet era, I visited what was then known as Leningrad. Being a follower of art and architecture I joined tours to the royal palaces and spent many an hour studying the fine collections displayed in the architectural splendour of the Hermitage.
Those grand buildings had been immaculately restored by the Soviets. When the political contradictions of this were raised with one of the official guides, her explanation was that the palaces were respected under Communism as a testament to the skills of the Russian workers. To me that seemed a valid enough justification for continuing to look after such remarkable architecture.
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