The linking of the exhibition to the anniversary is rather formal - in the sense that the opened exposition can in no way be called either retrospective or complete. On the contrary, the organizers deliberately decided to show only one of the periods of creativity of Ivan Fomin - St. Petersburg. In total, the exhibition features about 40 sheets of architectural graphics, demonstrating projects on which the leading master of the St. Petersburg neoclassical school worked before moving to Moscow in 1929.
All the main works, both realized and forever remaining on paper, are present here: the spa hall on mineral waters, "New Petersburg", the ensemble of buildings by Tuchkov Buyan, Nikolaevsky railway station. They organically complement the graphics and archival materials, including photographs from the family archive, catalogs of exhibitions during his lifetime, posters and materials related to Fomin's activities as the head of the Architectural Workshop of the Sovkomkhoz on the settlement of the Petrograd plan. A monitor is also installed here to demonstrate a video dedicated to the current state of perhaps the most famous building of the architect - the Abamelek-Lazarev house.
And although, in general, Ivan Fomin left a noticeable mark in his native Petersburg (in addition to the mentioned mansion on the Moika River embankment, according to his projects, the Polovtsev house on Kamenny Island and two tenement houses in Kakhovsky Lane, as well as the portico of the building on Bolshaya Morskaya, 16 obelisks on the Chernyshevsky bridge), of the greatest interest, perhaps, are his town-planning plans. This, of course, is, first of all, "New Petersburg" on Golodai Island, where Fomin proposed to implement a large ensemble composition in the Palladian style, as well as the development of Tuchkov Buyan, which he planned to turn into a large-scale exhibition and entertainment center. By the way, in the last project the architect showed himself not only as a city planner, but also as a defender of old Petersburg. His project - the only one presented at a closed competition in 1913 - assumed the complete preservation and inclusion of the "Biron's palace" in the new complex. From the same point of view, no less interesting is the "Project for unloading three nodes of Nevsky", in which Fomin proposed to lay two alternatives of the main avenue of the city - northern (along Italyanskaya street) and southern (along Lomonosov street) - with minimal demolition of the existing buildings.
Delicacy in relation to the architectural heritage and at the same time the ability to actively interact with it - this, it seems, distinguishes a truly "Petersburg" architect. That is probably why the Museum of the History of St. Petersburg focused only on what Fomin did and was going to do for the former capital. Someone will be intrigued by the graphic sheets with the quality of elaboration and the utopian nature of the idea, while others will not be too lazy to trace how viable the architect's ideas turned out to be. For example, in the project of Nikita Yavein's Ladozhsky railway station, one can see allusions to the Fominsk design of the building of the Nikolaevsky railway station in 1912, and recall the reconstruction of Tuchkov Buyan in connection with the project "Embankment of Europe" being implemented at the same place now.
Sentimental considerations inevitably come to mind when viewing an exhibition. Fomin was supposed to become an ideal "Petersburg" architect, but first the war and then the revolution did not allow him to fully realize his ideas. However, Fomin's creative method itself - a conversation with classics on equal terms, attention to heritage and the ability to instantly switch from the most ambitious tasks to working out the smallest details - and his scrupulous approach to working on projects are as relevant for St. Petersburg today as a century ago. And from this point of view, a small, almost intimate exhibition, timed to coincide with the anniversary, is timely like no other.
