Re-Engineered Breif: The Palace of The Soviets

In 1811 after Moscow had a been raised to the ground by the great fire and the last of Napoleons soldiers had left the city the Tsar in all his power declared that a great monument was to be built, signify his gratitude to Divine Providence for saving Russia from the doom that overshadowed her.    The monument a testament to Russia’s victory over Napoleon and a memorial to the sacrifices of the Russian people was to take the form of the largest Cathedral the country had ever seen.  In order to make way for the mammoth temple the Tsar ordered the destruction of the Alexseyevsky Convent.   The nuns of the convent were so strongly opposed to the denegation and demolition of their church that the Abbess cursed the ground on which the cathedral was built.

Having stated that any building to be built on the ground were the convent had once stood would be destroyed to see another built in its place. So that that they would never be forgotten,   the nuns declared the ground to carry the trace of ‘effacement’, allowing disappearance to appear and so began a continuous process of transformation.

Following the destruction of the first convent many other monuments where built on the site. As the Abbess had affirmed all where doomed but what she had not anticipated was the power given to the each new building by the destruction of its predecessor. 

The site became a true representation of the turbulent history of Russia  and all who wanted to be seen or heard new that they must congregate there. It became the site of demonstrations and of the rise and fall of regimes. Each episode leaving its mark, the site carried the scars of monumental cannibalisation. It was desired by those who wanted power and loved by those who saw it as a testament to a forgone past – through their absence the presence these monuments was felt.

The Tsars, the Soviets and the present day powers have all laid claim to this site. In an effort to erase the past international competitions have been held, monuments built and destroyed with out mercy or respect. All of these stages leaving their trace of ‘effacement’ on this eclectic ruin: a monument to lost monuments and all that they embodied.

'History is not continuous. It is made up of stops and starts, of presences and absences. The presences are the times when history is vital, is "running" is feeding on itself and deriving it's energy from its own momentum. The absences are the times when the propulsive organism is dead, the voids in between one "run" of history and the next. These are filled by memory. Where history ends, memory begins.'

Peter Eisenman, Essay ‘The Fluidity of Objects’