Courtesy Shchusev State Museum of architecture

Editor’s Note: Deyan Sudjic is director of London’s Design Museum. This is an edited excerpt from “Imagine Moscow: Architecture, Propaganda, Revolution,” the book accompanying a new exhibition at the museum.

CNN  — 

When you look at Europe’s capital cities, you see, spelled out in physical form, the nature of the ideas that brought them into being.

Today’s London is the fruit of unintended consequences. Its skyline is dictated by a market economy, distorted by the demands placed on it by politicians who have tried to shift the provision of civic amenities onto private finance.

Paris has a historic center built for Napoleon III by Baron Haussmann in an attempt to create the image of an imperial capital, though not successful enough to discourage the Paris Commune or the Prussian invasion of 1870.

Moscow has different roots. With the Kremlin at its heart, it still has a structure bequeathed by a medieval autocracy. Since 1917 it was the subject of a concerted effort to make it the capital not just of Russia or of the Soviet Union, but of a new world order. A capital shaped not by the market, but by an idea of what a city could be.

Abandoning tradition

When the Alekseyevsky convent was built on a water meadow just outside the Kremlin wall in 1347, Moscow was a city still being fought over by Poles, Lithuanians and Russians. The city was just a couple of centuries old, and still had memories of being burned to the ground by the Tartars. Over seven centuries this particular site reveals the violent shifts in the nature of not just Moscow, but Russia too.

The remains of the convent were demolished to make way for the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, the largest Orthodox church in the world, paid for with the kopeks of Russian peasants dropped into collecting boxes all over Russia, as a celebration of national deliverance from Napoleon’s troops.

Czar Alexander I had commissioned Aleksander Vitberg to design a cathedral of a scale and grandeur that would reflect Russia’s ambition to be seen as a mighty and expansive state. With a dome more than 750 feet high, it would have been twice the size of the Vatican. But there were doubts about its feasibility.

Courtesy Shchusev State Museum of architecture
An illustration of the Palace of the Soviets, designed by architect Boris Iofan.
Courtesy Tchoban Foundation
A 1944 illustration of the Palace of the Soviets by Boris Iofan, Vladimir Shchuko and Vladimir Gelfreikh.
Courtesy Tchoban Foundation
The design for Ivan Leonidov's United Nations Building from 1947-48.
Courtesy Tchoban Foundation
A design by architect Yakov Chernikhov for an industrial area, c. 1924-33.
Courtesy Tchoban Foundation
A Yakov Chernikhov set design with concave surfaces from the late 1920s.
Courtesy Tchoban Foundation
A competition design for the monument for the first artificial earth satellite in Moscow by Ivan Leonidov, c. 1958.

After Vitberg was accused of embezzlement and exiled to Siberia, Alexander’s successor, Nikolas I, handed the project over to another architect, Konstantin Ton, who redesigned it in a more traditional Russian style, and on a more modest scale.

Nevertheless, at 360 feet to the top of the cross on its biggest dome, it was still as tall as London’s St Paul’s. When it was finally completed, Tchaikovsky wrote the 1812 overture in celebration.

A taper lit at one of its altars was believed to bring good fortune, provided that you could get it home without it blowing out. Easter services attracted thousands of worshipers to the vast white marble structure.

Stalin dynamited the church in 1931. He was determined to recast the center of Moscow, and he wanted the site for the Palace of the Soviets, the symbol of his regime.

A new vision

Under the supervision of Stalin’s close political ally, Vyacheslav Molotov, a competition was organized to find a designer. The brief was to produce a “monumental structure outstanding in its architectural formulation,” according to the May 1940 issue of The Architecture of the USSR.

Molotov’s men searched the world for suitable candidates. Walter Gropius and Hans Polezig, competitors for the chance to build Hitler’s Reichsbank just two years earlier, took part alongside Erich Mendelsohn, Auguste Perret, Le Corbusier, Naum Gabo and three Soviet architectural teams.

The eventual winner after several rounds was Boris Iofan, a well-connected architect from Ukraine, who was not yet forty.

After studying in Odessa, Ukraine, Iofan had spent ten years in Rome working in the studio of Armando Brasini, the man who became close to Mussolini and worked in Libya and on the replanning of Rome.

His design, guided by what he went on to describe as Stalin’s genius would have been as tall as the Empire State Building, topped by a representation of Lenin, pointing at the Kremlin, that itself would have overshadowed the Statue of Liberty.

Topical Press Agency/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
The Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow in 1925

Together reaching 500 meters (1640 feet) high, the scale would have been without historical precedent.

Stalin asked the finalists to incorporate “the best of the past, with modern technology,” per to the May 1940 issue of Architecture of the USSR. To this end, Iofan teamed up with officially approved architects Vladimir Shchuko and Vladimir Gelfreikh to build the project. But it was Iofan that Stalin chose to rebuild Moscow in his image.

Living in the House on the Embankment, the sprawling city within the city he had built himself to house the party elite, Iofan could have watched the dynamiting of the basilica from the window of his apartment. He might have looked on as ill-fated residents were marched away by the NKVD (known in English as The People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs) on many nights during the purges. The survivors would ask the doormen for the names of the disappeared.

Justifying the destruction of the basilica, Iofan claimed that the old church was “huge, and cumbersome, looking like a cake, or a samovar … which (symbolized) the power and the taste of the lords of old Moscow.”

Growing challenges

Those still brave enough to challenge Stalin’s determination to destroy every trace protested angrily. Several priests who tried to salvage religious relics were summarily shot, while two technicians who refused to take part in dynamiting the remains of the hulk were sent to the gulags. Remembering the sacrifices of the Russian people in defeating an invader from Western Europe was off the agenda.

Having destroyed the Holy Savior, the leaders of the new Moscow started on building its replacement in 1935.

“Why is the podium raised so little above the hall?” Stalin demanded, according to Architecture of the USSR. “It must be higher. There must be no chandeliers, the illumination must come from indirect light.”

The main hall was increased to a capacity of 21,000 seats, under a 380-foot high dome. It was ringed by six smaller halls, each thematically expressing a section of the six-part oath Stalin took when he succeeded Lenin, including the Stalin Constitution Hall, and the Hall of the Building of Socialism, as well as a Museum of World Revolution.

The tower was designed in classical fashion, in three related parts. The base was to represent the precursors of socialism, the shaft of the tower Marx and Engels; the whole was crowned, of course, by the vision of Lenin. The tips of his fingers, 20 feet long, would have been lost in cloud on many days.

The Soviet Union, however, did not have the skill to build the structure. Accounts of the troubled construction of the original basilica, which had been plagued by flooding caused by a high water table and pressure from the river, were ignored by Stalin’s cowed experts.

Things seemed to go well at first. The foundations for the palace had been dug by the end of 1938 and work started on the steelwork. Clearing the entire site would have involved jacking up the Pushkin Museum, mounting it on huge rollers and moving it bodily out of the way, which the Politburo were fully prepared to do.

Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Joseph Stalin with Vladimir Lenin in Gorky, USSR (now Nizhny Novgorod, Russia) in 1922.

By 1939, the road closures necessary to prepare for moving the museum out of the way had been announced. But the site was getting increasingly waterlogged and nothing that Iofan tried would solve the problem. The retaining walls were tanked with tar and lined with tombstones, but neither stopped the water rising for long.

Many far more powerful men were executed as saboteurs for much less conspicuous failures, but Iofan evidently had a special rapport with Stalin that saved him from the gulag and the Lubyanka. He was left to build the Soviet pavilion at the New York World’s Fair in 1939.

The process of building was as important for Stalin’s purposes as the finished product. Moscow’s shop windows in the 1930s and 1940s could offer little in the way of food, let alone consumer goods. But they were filled with images that depicted the Palace of the Soviets, in that distinctive dreamlike style favored during the Stalin years.

The dictator had himself portrayed as the fount of all this magnificence, its creative genius, infantilizing the Soviet Union in the process. The Architecture of the USSR May 1940 issue devoted twelve pages to Iofan, printing his picture next to the latest version of the Palace of the Soviets, with pages reproduced from his sketchbook showing watercolors of the Pantheon and the Roman amphitheater at Syracuse.

He was described as a master of Soviet architecture, and the piece documents the transformation of the conference hall from its original 1932 design to its final incarnation. In the first version, three concentric drums surround the dome. They sprout classical wings in the shape of twin crescents equipped with an endless procession of giant Corinthian columns flanking the entrance.

After that came the tower, and the ever more colossal statue of Lenin.

After Stalin

It was only the German invasion of 1941 that stopped work. The palace’s structural steel, by this time reaching as high as the eleventh floor, was dismantled for war use; Iofan and his models were transferred to a new studio on the eastern side of the Urals.

After the war, Iofan returned to his apartment, and continued to work on the project, offering Stalin a number of options for its completion, none of which was adopted.

Instead, Stalin decided on another project to transform Moscow by building a ring of highrise towers that in their impact recalled some of the Constructivists’ proposals from the 1920s, but used a very different architectural language, one that drew on Iofan’s work for the Palace of the Soviets.

The project to build eight towers was announced in 1947. Moscow State University, designed by Lev Rudnev, is the largest. Along with the Hotel Ukraina, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Leningradskaya Hotel and three other towers, it was completed by 1952.

courtesy Santiago Calatrava
Unlike OPA's house in a cliff, many of the most interesting designs in architecture have never been realized. Here's a look at the greatest buildings that never were.

How different Chicago's skyline would have looked if Calatrava's 2005 design had been built. One thousand four hundred and fifty eight feet (444 meters) of slender twisted steel and glass, the Chicago Spire would have knocked the Willis Tower (formely the Sears Tower) down a peg, trumping it by a whole two meters and a whole lot of style. The 920,000 square foot structure would have featured residential apartments, retail space and a five-star hotel, with each floor rotating 2 degrees around a central core, turning 270 degrees through the height of the building.

But then the global financial crisis hit. Construction halted in 2008 with claims that heavy debts had been racked up. In this instance Donald Trump was right: the Chicago Spire had been "financial suicide."
The Estate of R. Buckminster Fuller
A two mile-wide geodesic dome over Midtown Manhattan doesn't sound like the most practical way to reduce air pollution and regulate weather, but Buckminster Fuller and Sandao once went to great lengths mapping out plans for one in 1960. Spanning the East River to the Hudson and covering 62nd Street to 22nd Street, they planned for it to be built from shatterproof glass, mist-plated with aluminum to reduce glare from the sun. Weighing 4,000 tonnes, Fuller argued that the structure, built by a fleet of helicopters fitting each glass plate, would cost $200 million and be invisible to the naked eye for those inside. There were potential problems for the dome, however: Fuller stipulated that cars or engines of any kind were to be banned. Oh, and there was the chance the dome might float away. It's been argued that, because the dome's weight was comparable to that of the air beneath it, it could float in hot weather, and would have to be anchored in place with cables. Surprisingly, the idea never took off.
courtesy Bibliothèque nationale de France
Spheres were integral to the work of mathematician Sir Isaac Newton, in life and, at one time, in death. The great scientist worked out the force holding us to the big sphere beneath our feet, and French architect Etienne-Louis Boullee thought it would be a fitting shape to remember him by.

In 1784 he drew up plans for a grand, 500 foot (150 m) cenotaph -- eight meters taller than Strasbourg Cathedral, the highest building at the time. Inside was to be a void, with small holes in the building's shell allowing sunlight to pierce through, mapping out star constellations and planets and acting as a vast planetarium. Though never built, etchings of the concept were popular, with copies currently held a the Bibliotheque Nationale de France.
courtesy Tchoban Foundation
Boris Iofan's colossal design for the Palace of the Soviets has become one of the finest examples of an architectural moonshot that fell to earth. The imposing design was the winning entry of an international competition in 1931 for a new administrative and congress hall in Moscow, Russia. At a height of 1,365 feet (416m), it would have eclipsed the Empire State Building as the tallest in the world, while the 160 meter wide, 100 meter tall main hall held the capacity for 21,000 seats.

The design was heavily revised over time -- partially under the instruction of Stalin himself -- emphasizing both neoclassical motifs and the gigantic statue of Lenin atop. The foundations were laid down by 1939 but the Nazi invasion in 1941 halted construction. It never resumed, although the abandoned site would still become home to a record-breaking build -- the Moskova Pool, in 1958, the world's largest outdoor swimming pool.
Courtesy Zaha Hadid Architects
Zaha Hadid's Tokyo Olympic Stadium was many things -- ultramodern, typically curvacious and above all, very expensive. The design for the 2020 Games was also intended for the 2019 Rugby World Cup, but it was not without its detractors: leading Japanese architect Arata Isozaki labeled it a "disgrace to future generations." However construction costs spiraled as the price of steel rose, with a stadium's new price tag increasing to 250 billion yen ($2.02 billion). Eventually in July 2015 Prime Minister Shinzo Abe announced the design was being scrapped for a more cost-effective alternative.
The Library of Congress
The Coney Island Globe Tower, seen at the rear of this New York Tribune cover, was the ambitious megastructure dreamed up by Samuel Friede. Proposed in May 1906, it was to include a 700 foot (213 meter) sphere with multiple floors, containing everything from restaurants to garden to a bowling alley -- not to mention the world's largest ballroom and a theme park. All in all, it would have fitted 50,000 people and operate 24 hours a day.

As with most grand schemes, the problem was money. Friede advertized the project looking for $1,500,000 of investment, saying the project was expected to pay 100% interest annually. The cornerstone was laid on May 26, and investors jumped at the chance to make such returns. All was not how it seemed, however.

Delays followed and anxiety spread throughout the city. Another ceremony was held when the first piece of steel was moved into place. Promises were broken and the threat of injunctions followed. By 1908 it was discovered that the ambitious project wasn't just a pipe dream -- it was a fraud.
Virtual Artworks/All Design
It was supposed to be the centerpiece of Liverpool, England's redevelopment as European Capital of Culture in 2008. As it stands, all that remains of the Fourth Grace (also known as The Cloud) are these beautiful renderings. The concept, which was once described as a "diamond knuckleduster" by The Guardian, won an architectural competition in 2002 for a fourth building to sit alongside Liverpool's Three Graces - the Royal Liver Building, the Cunard Building and the Port of Liverpool building. A mixture of museum and commercial rental space, its £228 million ($322 million) budget spiraled to £324 million ($457 million) by 2004, spelling the end to a design that the locals, if not the architectural community, were set against from the off.
courtesy Woods Bagot
Another victim of the global economic slump, the Nakheel Harbour and Tower in Dubai failed to fly when, six years after being proposed, it was canceled in December 2009. The 3,280 feet (one kilometer) high tower was first mooted as the centerpiece of Palm Jumeirah, the vast man-made archipelago in the Persian Gulf, although it was later re-located closer to the Dubai Marina. The design for the mixed-use complex drew on Islamic monuments of the past according to the architects, invoking the Harbor of Alexandria, the bridges of Isafahan, the gardens of Alhambra and the promenade of Tangier -- but like the Lighthouse of Alexandria, the plan, estimated to cost $38 billion, came crumbling down.

After Stalin’s death, Khrushchev was ready to denounce the crimes of his predecessor in a closed session of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. He turned the remains of the palace into the largest swimming pool in the city, a perfect circle with a 100 meter (328 feet) diameter, presenting a less autocratic, more populist version of the Soviet system.

From his increasingly shabby apartment, Iofan could again have looked down on a demolition site. This time, though, the destruction was of the project for which he had surrendered his integrity to the dictator of the twentieth century with more blood on his hands than Hitler. Iofan died in 1979.

The Soviet Union had only another thirteen years left. In the last years of the Soviet Union, the pool closed and the water was drained. Even before the collapse of the old system, the state had given permission for a new church to be rebuilt on the site.

The first post-Soviet mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov, demolished the pool and began to build a replica of what Stalin had destroyed in one of the first and most conspicuous projects of his 18-year reign.

Moscow today

Emerging from Moscow’s Kropotkinskaya metro station today, you pass the loafers drinking beer at the café table. You turn, and are confronted by a vision so dazzling that you can hardly see anything else. The five golden domes of the Basilica of Christ the Savior hurt the eyes, gleaming in the sun with a patina that seems to turn a vivid shade of turquoise.

A bronze relief frieze of figures runs around the exterior, charting Russian history. Warriors clutch their spears and bearded priests brandish the word of God, held aloft on metal tablets, like the digital cameras raised by supplicant tourists.

The basilica is protected by a metal fence and ringed by elaborate cast-iron lamp posts, stone balustrades, and endless sequences of steps. It sits on a band of putty-colored granite with a gray, rusticated stone base. Get closer and you discover that under the surface is a subterranean complex of ramps, roads and underground parking lots, all of which betray the whole gleaming confection as a faithful hallucination.

This is a replica of the church that Stalin destroyed. The bronze doors, sculptures, inscriptions, gaudy flower beds, lamp posts and carved stone are all the work of late twentieth century craftsmen. It is the kind of thing the people who make hyper realistic effigies for Jeff Koons would do if left to themselves.

Courtesy David Burdeny
Vancouver photographer David Burdeny photographed Moscow's most majestic metro stations.
Courtesy David Burdeny
Baroque, Art Deco and Futurist architecture are all represented, among other styles.
Courtesy David Burdeny
Some feature stained glass windows, marble columns, crystal chandeliers, gilded mosaics and painted scenes from Russian history.
Courtesy David Burdeny
"Typically, a metro station is a pedestrian place which serves as a utilitarian device to get you from one place to another. But these were extraordinarily built and constructed, [with] a whole architectural narrative built into them," Burdeny said.
Courtesy David Burdeny
Burdeny had originally planned to focus on stations in both Moscow and St Petersburg, but changed his mind after stepping into Komsomolskaya station for the first time.
Courtesy David Burdeny
"They just completely blew away the St Petersburg stations," he says.
Courtesy David Burdeny
Burdeny shot 20 stations in total. He would visit them between 12:30 am and 5:30 am, when the stations were closed, shooting three or four a night.
Courtesy David Burdeny
The Moscow Metro, which opened in 1935, was conceived by Joseph Stalin as part of his first Five-Year Plan to rapidly industrialize the Soviet Union.
Courtesy David Burdeny
The spectacular stations were meant to show the world the power and possibilities the Communist Party presented.
Courtesy David Burdeny
Impressively, Novoslobodskaya Metro Station features 32 stained glass panels by Latvian artists.
Courtesy David Burdeny
Originally intended to connect to the never-realized Palace of the Soviets (an ambitious neo-classical state building), Kropotkinskaya Station was designed to be both seem both professional and sophisticated.
Courtesy David Burdeny
Taganskaya Metro Station is decorated with portraits of Communist war heroes.
Courtesy David Burdeny
Aeroport station, which was inspired by aviation, is an example of Russian Art Deco architecture.

The new church, like the memorial to Peter the Great across the river, is the product of the ex-mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov, and the sculptor Zurab Tsereteli. Boris Yeltsin himself laid the foundation stone, and lay inside the completed basilica when he died. It is the church in which the five members of Pussy Riot filmed their 40-second protest against the connections between the Orthodox church and Putin’s regime.

Some years ago, I was given a tour Iofan’s apartment in the House on the Embankment. From the bedroom window, I looked out to see the rebuilt domes of Christ the Savior. The room had been neglected for decades. A plastic shower curtain had been slung over boxes of the architect’s papers, but it did little to protect them from the dust caused by the workmen attempting to modernize the kitchen.

There was a plaster maquette of the Lenin statue from the Palace of the Soviets under the desk. In one box I found sheaves of black-edged envelopes. I opened one to find that it contained a telegram from Stalin. Iofan’s plea to have one of his assistants released from fighting the Germans so that he could join the evacuated architectural studio beyond the Urals had been granted.

There were ancient photo albums. Here was Iofan shaking hands with Frank Lloyd Wright as they tour the Soviet pavilion that he designed for the New York World’s Fair of 1939, an incongruous tribute to the proletarian revolution in Queens.

The chaotic mess of books and papers, medals and ancient electrical appliances, felt like the residue of an entire system. Which is exactly what it was.

“Imagine Moscow: Architecture, Propaganda, Revolution” is on at the Design Museum in London from March 15 to June 4, 2017.