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What Dallas McMansions and a Russian palace alleged to be Vladimir Putin’s have in common

A viral video exposé of a secret castle has sparked protests — and questions about style

When I began teaching a class on architecture and film a few years ago, I did not imagine just how urgently relevant the subject would become. Then the coronavirus plague arrived, and all of a sudden every interaction in our lives seemed to be mediated by screens, and the idea of work and the city in the Zoom era was something we were all forced to address.

And then came last month, when an architectural documentary — typically, the rather esoteric stuff of public broadcasting — sparked a national reckoning with a ruthless authoritarian regime.

That film is Putin’s Palace, an expose of the Versailles-scaled estate Russian President Vladimir Putin has allegedly constructed for himself on the Black Sea. Produced and narrated by Alexei Navalny, the now-jailed activist and opposition leader, the film runs to nearly two hours and has been viewed more than 106 million times on YouTube — almost certainly record viewing for any film on architecture.

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Its release, conjoined with Navalny’s imprisonment, brought countless thousands of protesters onto streets across Russia, which is reeling from economic crisis, the pandemic and a general loss of faith in Vladimir Putin’s klepto-cratic leadership.

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In the film, architecture serves as both the literal and symbolic epitome of Putin’s corruption and power lust. While his country suffers, the Russian president allegedly builds (and then rebuilds, because the first attempt is botched) a $1.3 billion residential complex on an estate Navalny describes with wicked humor as 39 times the size of Monaco. “Vladimir Putin fancies himself the Russian emperor and behaves accordingly,” says Navalny, describing him as pathologically “obsessed with wealth and luxury.”

In response to the film, Putin denied that the palace was his, and the Russian petrochemical oligarch (and Putin ally) Arkady Rotenberg claimed to be the client of the project. But the film makes it hard to believe that it was created for and by anyone but the Russian president.

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Located outside the seaside town of Gelendzhik, it is almost comically lavish, a virtual Kremlin-on-the-sea, surrounded by vineyards and protected by multiple levels of security, including a no-fly zone overhead. According to the film, it has its own church, a sculpture garden, a boulevard lined by rare trees, an arboretum (with 40 gardeners to keep it up), an amphitheater, an underground hockey rink (Navalny: “Who needs a palace in which you cannot play hockey?”), an amphitheater, a guest house accessed by a 260-foot-long bridge, a power station, staff dormitories, an operations center, a pair of helipads and its own gas station.

And then there is the palace itself, a colossus of nearly 200,000 square feet. Its designer is Lanfranco Cirillo, an Italian architect who began working with Russian petrochemical executives in the 1990s, moving up in the oligarchic food-chain until he reached Putin himself. “More than architecture, we have sold a way of life,” he told Radio Free Europe in a 2015 interview. “There is a big difference between an expensive home and a classy, elegant home.”

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The model, to the extent that there is one, is the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, the imperial residential complex of the Russian czars, and now the Hermitage Museum. It too, and perhaps not coincidentally, was largely designed by an imported Italian architect, Bartolomeo Rastrelli, who could bring the cultured taste of the font of classical architecture to the Russian empire.

It is worth noting that this same impulse, born of a combined insecurity and ambition, is why European architects like Renzo Piano and Santiago Calatrava find such success in the United States, and Dallas in particular. Piano’s suave Genovese accent, for instance, surely sounds more “classy” than, say, the Bronx-tinged diction of Peter Bohlin — among this nation’s most distinguished architects — whose firm, Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, is headquartered in unromantic Wilkes-Barre, Pa.

The Winter Palace in St. Petersburg is now part of the renowned State Hermitage museum.
The Winter Palace in St. Petersburg is now part of the renowned State Hermitage museum. ( Photos by Tom Waseleski - Gazette )

But Cirillo is no Rastrelli, and so while the palace apes the scale and grandiosity of the Hermitage, it lacks the essential dignity of the original, its sense of imperial grandeur. It is, in effect, a McMansion scaled up to palatial level, with the kind of amenities you’d find in an upscale suburban development in North Dallas: indoor pool, home theater, gym, bar, closet space galore.

There are more ambitious elements depicted in the film as well, of the kind you’d find in a Las Vegas hotel: a casino, a hookah bar (with stripper pole), an “aquadiskotheque,” an actual theater with private boxes. The bedroom is the size of a large apartment, with its own living room “for resting before resting,” quips Navalny, who was sentenced to more than two years in jail last week for parole violations.

Besides the tawdry detailing and construction, the essential difference between the palace and its historical models is conceptual. The great palaces were not just residences, but public expressions of an all-encompassing philosophical framework that reflected the monarch’s godlike presence across the entire physical and intellectual space of empire.

The point of the endless enfilade (series of aligned rooms) at Versailles, and its Cartesian formal gardens extending out into the distance, was not simply to be “classy,” but to translate that philosophy into a three-dimensional universe. The palace appears to have no such metaphysical pretensions. It is a bureaucrat’s vision of a palace, not a monarch’s. There is no organizing principle beyond an accumulation of luxury and the provision of material comforts. The allée of trees is just an allée of trees. It goes nowhere and signifies nothing except that allegedly Putin has the power to conjure it.

In America, we have no imperial palaces; power rests with the people, and it is represented by the architecture of our democratic institutions, the Capitol being most prominent among them. And so we have an unexpected inversion: in Russia, protesters activated by architecture rallying against an autocrat and for democratic reform, and in America, an angry mob, spurred by a leader hoping to upend a democratic process, attacking the very architecture that symbolizes that form of government.

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That attack on American democracy failed, and former President Donald Trump has now taken up residence at his own seaside mansion, Mar-a-Lago. A National Historic Landmark, it was designed in the Roaring ‘20s for the heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post, with 58 bedrooms on 17 acres, making it one of the largest private residences in the country.

Trump, of course, is famous for his own gilded style, but there is nothing secret about his seaside estate. For the right price, access is yours. There is, indeed, a waiting list to join Mar-a-Lago. Ostentatious luxury is Trump’s brand, and his empire is built on his ability to market that sensibility in products ranging from condos to steaks to education. And here there is a difference between Russian culture, where even the idea of attaining such material extravagance has been historically unthinkable, to that distinctly American worldview in which it is presumed to be a desirable and attainable goal.

What is shared between Putin and Trump is an operating belief that, in the argot of Wall Street, “greed is good,” or at least good for them. It is that essential principle that characterizes their architecture. It is, in a sense, stylistically agnostic — neoclassical, baroque, Moorish, modern — it doesn’t really matter, so long as it’s bombastic, an exercise in self-aggrandizement. Call it authoritarian chic.

Watching Navalny’s documentary, I was put in mind of a work of Russian architecture that in its modesty, humor and genuine interest in that country’s built history makes it the virtual antithesis of the palace.

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The vodka ceremony pavilion (2003) designed by the Russian architect Alexander Brodsky in...
The vodka ceremony pavilion (2003) designed by the Russian architect Alexander Brodsky in the Moscow suburb of Klyazma, in Russia. It is constructed of reclaimed windows from a demolished factory. (Mark Lamster)

Set in a development on the outskirts of Moscow, it is a small white-washed structure composed entirely of reclaimed windows from a demolished 19th-century factory. Inside, it is luminous, with small openings that look out onto a birch forest. It was designed by the architect Alexander Brodsky with a single purpose: a ceremonial pavilion for drinking vodka.

It is nice to think that, in these times, a building like that exists. Even if I’d like to visit it a bit too frequently for my own good.

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