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RUSSIAN HERITAGE FOUNDATION FORMS TO PRESERVE MOSCOW’S ARCHITECTURAL LEGACY

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NEW YORK CITY — These days, Moscow faces a new hammer — the sledgehammer of real estate development and the subsequent plight faced by the city’s most important architectural monuments that were designed by the great vanguard architects of the 1920s and 1930s.

Sergey Gordeyev, a prominent Russian senator, has taken up the cause to save those historic landmarks and founded a cultural heritage preservation organization, Russian Avantgarde Foundation, which he now heads. He will be a featured speaker at a two-day symposium here September 28–29.

The foundation Board of Trustees also includes Mikhail B. Piotrovsky, director of the National Hermitage; Thomas Krens, director of the Solomon Guggenheim Foundation; Selim O. Han-Magomedov, researcher, expert and author of many scientific works on the Russian vanguard art; Lydia I. Iovleva, deputy director of the National Tretyakov Gallery; Eugenia N. Petrova, deputy director of the National Russian Museum; and Dmitry V. Sarabyanov, winner of the Russian Federation State Prize, the Russian Federation President’s Award for Culture and Art. Mikhail B. Vilkovsky is the chief executive officer of the foundation.

One of the main lines of activities for Russian Avantgarde Foundation is the Melnikov Museum, created in the private residence where architect Konstantin Melnikov lived and worked. The house is considered the peak of the master’s creative work, but now, because of the construction started nearby, it is under threat of destruction.

Other projects for the foundation include the Burevestnik Factory Club, another one of Melnikov’s well-known buildings;  the restoration of the Russian Pavilion in Venice, which opened on June 5 at the Venice Biennale; and forming an architectural graphics collection of original working drawings and personal archives of leading Russian architects of the Twentieth Century.

“Lost Vanguard: Soviet Modernist Architecture, 1922–32,” on view through October 29 at the Museum of Modern Art, underwritten by the foundation, includes contemporary photography that captures striking vanguard-style structures built in the former Soviet Union during the 1920s and early 1930s, many of which are now severely dilapidated, and some are threatened with demolition.

The symposium, “Vanguard Lost and Found: Soviet Modernist Architecture between Peril and Preservation?” addresses the pressing issues of preserving the modernist legacy of the most significant edifices built by radical Soviet architects in the 1920s and 1930s.

With two keynote addresses, six case studies and a roundtable discussion, this event features prominent Russian, European and American architects, historians and policymakers who will explore the current situation and fate of the Soviet vanguard architecture creations, neglected and threatened by speculative real estate developments.

The events takes place on Friday, September 28, 5:30 to 7:30 pm, at the Architectural League of New York, 457 Madison Avenue, and Saturday, September 29, 10 to 5, at the Museum of Modern Art in the Celeste Bartos Theater, 4 West 54th Street.

For foundation information, www.avangard-ru.org. For symposium information, call Meg Blackburn at 212-708-9757.