Russia's largest company, Gazprom, announced on Friday that it had chosen the architecture firm RMJM London to design this city's tallest building, brushing aside arguments from preservationists and residents that the project -- whoever the architect -- would destroy the city's architectural harmony.
RMJM's winning proposal includes a twisting glass tower that would anchor a business and residential center planned for a site on the Neva River opposite the Smolny Cathedral, one of the city's most famous landmarks.
The proposed tower would rise 396m -- taller than the 122m-high Peter and Paul Cathedral built 300 years ago by Peter the Great.
Gazprom's chief executive, Alexei Miller, hailed the project as a "new symbol of St. Petersburg" akin to city landmarks including the Admiralty, St. Isaac's Church and the Peter and Paul Cathedral.
"This new, modern project will give birth to a new mentality for St. Petersburg, which lives in a new, modern civilization," said Miller, appearing with the city's governor, Valentina Matviyenko. "And its citizens will feel the pulse of the new economy, the pulse of the contemporary world."
Gazprom selected the RMJM proposal over five other designs by the noted architects Jean Nouvel of Paris, Massimiliano Fuksas of Rome, the Swiss team of Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, Rem Koolhaas of Rotterdam and Daniel Libeskind of Berlin.
The competition stirred weeks of ferocious debate. Even as Gazprom's executives met with city officials and experts on the selection commission at the company's headquarters on the English Embankment, a small group of protesters passed back and forth aboard a small trawler in the Neva, dressed as clowns and mental patients and holding a sign deriding the project. "Lunatic City," the sign said. (The project is referred to as Gazprom City.)
There was also dissension within the selection panel. Japanese architect Kisho Kurokawa, who was invited to serve as a member of the jury, read a two-page statement on Friday describing his vision for St. Petersburg, which would preserve its cityscape on a lower scale, and opposing any of the projects under consideration.
He then resigned from the jury and left.
In a telephone interview later, he said the city's current limit on building heights was "the most sensitive issue to keeping the existing cultural value of the old city center."
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