42. irina polin (bern)
«hotel rossia»
• opening: 02.06.05, 19 uhr • exhibition: 02.06 - 07.06.05
Over the past 37 years the picture of the Red Square in Moscow includes a huge 21 floor block - the biggest hotel of the USSR and one of the biggest hotel complexes of the world, Hotel "Rossia". It was built in 1968, the year of "blossom of socialism", and it became the icon of Soviet modern architecture.
Four sides of the hotel, Northern, Western, Southern and Easten, include restaurants, banket halls, bars on different levels, shops, conference halls, huge consert hall, cinema, and 3200 rooms with about 6000 beds, which were, first of all, planned for inviting guests of the Congresses of the Comunist Party.
The best architects used the best matherials for decorating the main hotel of the country, and there was always enough money and energy for it. Enough, till Perestroyka came...
The history of the building reads like the history of the USSR, which at the bed end of the metaphor scale was often compaired to a "house built on solid foundation". In the end the foundation proved to be faulty. The death of an utopia, that promised bright future and ended up being "empty place" full of rats in front of the Red Square. The building was born and have aged with the idea of comunism and probably had to die together with it. Is it possible to put a new sole in a house like that?
By the year 1997 the hotel needed such a big renovation that the state simply decided to do nothing. One powerfull Chechenian family started to own it together with a big part of hotel business in Moscow. Plans for the reconstruction changed every other day. They tried different things from inviting known artists to big investors, but at the end opened a couple of strip-bars and a billiard club for themselves. One of the architects working for the reconstruction of the hotel tried to make models out of paper. She cutted out tiny tables and chairs and fixed them on the paper floor and made presentations in one of the 3200 rooms. It could take years just to build up a model.
The office of the new owners on the 17-th floor in the situation of Russian Chechenian war needed so much security that the whole Northern side locked the doors for the visitors. As it seams now, for ever. (The pictures I show were made from the North side windows. This is the inside yard of the empty hotel and the vew to the town.)
The cinema and the consert hall still funktion, the elevators bring some few tourists to their floors, but the demolition is decided. One of the next years the biggest hotel of the world in the 70-th will disappear for ever. A house built of concrete, a house built of idea, a house built of paper.
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