“We - writers, painters, sculptors, architects, admirers of the still untouched beauty …, - we have gathered to with all our might, with all the indignation of our souls, … in the name of French art and the threatened history of France, to express our protest against indecent elevation in the very heart of Paris of a useless and monstrous … tower, which the witty public, … has already christened Babylon. Something familiar, isn't it? So they wrote about the Eiffel Tower under construction, I note, not anonymous bloggers, but Charles Gounod, Guy de Maupassant, Emile Zola and other wonderful people. If the Eiffel's project is put up for public discussion, Paris will not see the tower. I don't think architectural decisions should be made by a majority vote. I will note in parentheses, if the law is not violated, for example, high-altitude regulations, as it was in St. Petersburg with the Okhta Center.
Now about the essence. We have before us an undoubtedly radical, but surprisingly accurate project. The wall completely changes the space of the square, near the endless and unformed desert with the theater building lost on it, a nerve, density, intrigue, development appears. There is a passage along the wall, there is through it, there is a right and left. The wall is the same Eiffel Tower, only lying down. I am sure, if the wall is built, they will immediately start making appointments, hanging flyers, campaigning for and against, hiding from the rain and playing hide and seek. The wall, and with it the square, will become an urban place, a point of attraction, not least due to the heated debate around it. By the way, they also argued about the tower until the First World War.
And at the same time, it is just a wall made of timber, a thin, even gentle line in the vast expanse of the square. Neither concrete, nor thousands of square meters, nor dozens of floors. There is in it the physicality of wooden houses that still stand on the outskirts of Perm, "the spruce Gothic of the Russian plains." A lot can be said about the symbolism of the wall, and it would be a fruitful discussion.
And the last thing. A frequent argument in speeches: there is not enough money for the improvement of the city, for the elementary, but here we are spending money on the wall. I do not argue that we need both roads and house repairs. But the sign of change, movement towards something new, is sometimes no less important. Like the Solovetsky stone on the site of Dzerzhinsky on Lubyanskaya Square. With this money, it was possible to paint a dozen facades, but at that moment a different choice was made in Moscow. Perm will also make its choice, I am sure.
