THE KEEPER OF MOSCOW’S ARCHITECTURAL CONSCIENCE
The New York Times
n/28appraisal.html
As director of the Shchusev State Museum of Architecture in Moscow,
David Sarkisyan was a flamboyant figure who held court in an office
crammed with sculptures, artifacts and souvenirs.
No one who visited the office of David Sarkisyan, the outspoken
director of the Shchusev State Museum of Architecture in Moscow,
soon forgot the experience. Wedged behind an ornate desk cluttered
with Soviet-era souvenirs, architectural tchotchkes and ashtrays,
he was constantly fulminating against the decrepit state of that
city’s landmarks, enthusing about a drawing he had discovered buried
somewhere in the museum’s archives, making introductions among the
architects, historians and socialites who constantly wandered in
and out, or pleading over the phone with the few journalists and
government officials he felt he could trust.
All the while he would be driving his points home with a lighted
cigarette; during one such visit several years ago his hands became so
animated as he described the atrocious condition of a 1920s apartment
block that his cigarette flew across the room.
To those of us conditioned by an international museum culture
dominated by polished directors and their powerful boards, he was
an extraordinary if anachronistic example of what a single person
at the helm of a crumbling institution with few financial resources
could accomplish – even in a world that seemed bent on silencing him.
Mr. Sarkisyan, who died on Jan. 7 at a Munich hospital at the age of
62, was the center of Moscow’s architectural world. Moreover, in an era
in which that capital’s historic buildings are being demolished with
alarming speed and brutality, he was one of very few people willing
to stand up to the city’s ruthless alliance of corrupt politicians
and powerful developers.
"He was not interested in having a comfortable life; he didn’t follow
any of the normal rules," Peter Noever, director of the Museum of
Applied Arts in Vienna, said in a recent telephone interview. "He
stood for resistance."
Mr. Sarkisyan, who had no formal education in architecture, was
an improbable champion of architectural causes. Born in Yerevan,
Armenia, in 1947, he worked as a pharmacologist and then in film,
both as a producer and director. (He worked on Rustam Khamdamov’s
art-house movie "Anna Karamazoff," becoming friends with the film’s
star, Jeanne Moreau.)
When he took over the museum in early 2000, at the request of the
Russian minister of construction, a close friend, it seemed like
a lost cause. Like many cultural institutions in the chaos of the
post-Soviet era, the museum had lost most of its state financing. Many
of its 19th-century galleries were badly dilapidated; in places, water
dripped from the ceiling into plastic buckets. To make ends meet,
the former director had rented some of its offices out to law firms.
Yet the museum was also a trove of architectural treasures, including
renderings and models from czarist times and the archives of many of
the titans of Soviet architecture, from Konstantin Melnikov to Alexei
Shchusev, after whom the institution was named.
Mr. Sarkisyan fell in love with it. He pushed out the law firms
and installed himself in a dark second-floor office. A flamboyant,
theatrical figure who liked his vodka, he held court there day and
night; his staff regularly found him in the mornings, on a small
daybed.
He was the first to show the work of major contemporary architects like
Coop Himmelblau and Rem Koolhaas in Moscow. And he mounted a number
of impressive shows, including one this past fall on a collaboration
between the artist Vera Muchina and the architect B. M.
Jofan that produced the Soviet Pavilion at the 1937 Paris World’s
Fair, a benchmark of Socialist Realism. At the time of his death he
was working on a show about Melnikov in collaboration with the Museum
of Applied Arts.
But most of all, he used his international connections to pressure
government officials – in particular the powerful mayor of Moscow,
Yuri Luzhkov – in a desperate effort to save the city he loved from
the wrecking ball.
In 2004 he wrote an open letter to both Mayor Luzhkov and
then-president Vladimir V. Putin deploring the widespread demolition
of historic buildings in Moscow. The letter caused an outcry in
the worldwide architecture community, and eventually led hundreds
of architects, curators and museum directors to petition the Russian
government for the enforcement of preservation laws. (If nothing else,
the mayor was forced into making a public reply.)
Among the wide range of buildings Mr. Sarkisyan fought to save was
the 1929 Melnikov House, which the architect designed for himself and
which became one of the great examples of early Soviet architecture;
the Moskva Hotel, a Stalin-era landmark designed by Shchusev; and
the Voyentorg department store, an Art Deco building completed in 1913.
His success was mixed. Melnikov’s two granddaughters, one of whom
is allied with a developer, are currently fighting each other for
control of his house in the courts; though both say they want it to
become a museum, its fate remains unclear. The Moskva Hotel and the
Voyentorg store have been demolished, and, in a cynical mockery of
historic preservation that has become the norm in today’s Moscow,
are being rebuilt as gaudy kitsch replicas. (The new Moskva, a Four
Seasons Hotel, will open this year.)
Even when he failed, however, Mr. Sarkisyan sought to make the public
conscious of what was being lost, not only in his activism but in the
way he ran the museum. The courtyard of his museum was decorated with
sculptural reliefs from the facade of the Cathedral of Christ the
Savior, which had been ordered demolished by Stalin in 1931. And Mr.
Sarkisyan often showed visitors the tarnished light fixtures and
doorknobs that he had salvaged from the wreckage of the Moskva Hotel.
In the months before Mr. Sarkisyan’s death, developers in Moscow
seemed to be embarking on yet another cycle of destruction. One
began gutting the interior of the Detsky Mir department store, a 1957
structure designed by Alexei Dushkin in a pared-down classical style,
which stands across a square from the old secret-police headquarters.
At around the same time the national government signed off on a plan
by the mayor’s wife, a billionaire developer, to demolish the vast
exhibition hall that houses the Tretyakov gallery’s 20th-century
collections – a landmark of Brezhnev-era Modernism – and replace it
with a luxury housing complex designed by Norman Foster.
It’s impossible to know if Mr. Sarkisyan could have done much to
stop these grotesque architectural crimes. But he, more than anyone,
made the world aware of what was at stake.
On January 15 hundreds attended a wake held at the museum, where his
body was displayed in an open coffin, as is Russian custom.
"Every kind of person was there," Mr. Noever told me. "Cleaning women,
artists, models with long legs, men in expensive suits who looked like
oligarchs – maybe a thousand people. And he was laid out like Lenin."
From: Baghdasarian