Futuristic going on feudal

Moscow’s $4-billion Crystal Island development won preliminary planning approval during the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day, just as Russians were beginning to need a glittering distraction from short, bleak winter days. Eye-popping images of the hugely ambitious project, designed for a site on the Moscow River by the British architect Norman Foster, more than fit the bill.

Essentially a city unto itself, Crystal Island would rank, if completed, as the biggest building in the world, with a total floor area of 27 million square feet, or about four times the size of the Pentagon. Its sharply peaked, tent-like form is designed to hold 900 apartments, 3,000 hotel rooms, an international school for 500 students, a shopping center, offices, a museum and a large sports complex.

Foster, whose 900-person firm has designed a number of expensive mega-projects in recent years, including Beijing’s new international airport and a 500-foot-high, climate-controlled dome planned for Kazakhstan, has said that Crystal Island is symbolic of a resurgent, newly confident Russia. He points to its many green-design features, including wind turbines and a massive array of solar panels, which he says will make the building a model of eco-efficiency.

Stripped of that press-conference rhetoric, though, the design itself says something entirely different -- something richly suggestive, in fact, about the kinds of buildings we can expect to see as political and financial leaders in rising authoritarian countries continue to seek out architecture’s most recognizable names. As a monument to the petro-wealth sloshing across much of the world, and of the stark gap between rich and poor in post-Soviet Moscow, Crystal Island could be hardly be more perfect.

The design also marks a dramatic change of direction for Foster, and more broadly for the group of globe-trotting celebrity architects of which he is a leading member. If it doesn’t signal a return to unfettered historicism in contemporary architecture, it is certainly packed fuller with references to the history of art and architecture than any building by a leading firm in recent memory.

Even the way Foster has chosen to present the project to the press has a sepia-toned quality. In stark contrast to the fluid computer-designed images we’ve grown used to seeing from top architects, many of the Crystal Island renderings from Foster’s office were downright painterly. One hand-drawn diagram of Crystal Island, showing how the sun would trace an arc above the building each day, is strategically old-fashioned enough to look Copernican.

Until now, Foster’s work has rarely strayed from the clean lines of high-tech glass-and-steel architecture. The Moscow design -- overseen by Mouzhan Majidi, chief executive of Foster + Partners -- seems to challenge observers to spot the many cues it takes from the architectural past.

Perhaps its most obvious forebear is Vladimir Tatlin’s “Monument to the 3rd International,” a tilting, ziggurat-like structure the Russian constructivist proposed as a tribute to the Communist revolution. In Crystal Island’s sharply tapering silhouette there are also echoes of later tributes to Tatlin’s unbuilt tower, notably Dan Flavin’s 1964 piece “Monument 1 for V. Tatlin,” which consists of seven white fluorescent tubes arranged in a skinny triangular form. Foster’s design finds an aesthetic middle ground between Tatlin’s tangle of steel beams and Flavin’s spare, ethereal composition.

But Tatlin’s project, which students of architectural history know practically by heart, was at least nominally dedicated to the idea of a classless society -- an idealistic, utopian project at its core. Crystal Island -- though sections will be open to the public -- is not afraid to advertise its role as a site for Moscow’s newly rich to park themselves and their money at a safe and dramatic remove from the rest of the city.

In that sense, the building, set to be completed by 2014, is a throwback to Dark Ages architecture, a place to display wealth and to hoard it at the same time. It is shaped like one of those medieval castles built high on a hill as a defense against marauding outsiders -- except in this case, because its site on a peninsula in southern Moscow is flat, the hill is simply built into the design at the base of the building. If topography provides no natural protection, in other words, the architects are pleased to provide it themselves.

Inviting biblical comparison

There are also echoes in Foster’s swirling design of the Tower of Babel as imagined by various artists over the centuries -- particularly Gustave Dore in his 1865 engraving “The Confusion of Tongues.” The Tower of Babel, so the biblical story goes, was built to reach to the heavens, and the hubris of its vertical ambition quickly got its inhabitants scattered, their single language broken into dozens of tongues. Crystal Island takes the standoff between earth and sky and ratchets it up a notch: Its upper floors taper to a point so sharp that the design seems eager not just to rise into the clouds but to pierce them.

The idea of any Old Testament-style comeuppance seems remote on Crystal Island, to say the least. Who holds the power to rebuke Russia’s nouveau riche? The Russian president, Vladimir Putin? He is the building’s ultimate patron, if not its patron saint. Yuri Luzhkov, the mayor of Moscow, is said to be a friend and ally of the building’s developer, an oil and real estate magnate named Shalva Chigirinsky. Foster is also working with Chigirinsky on Moscow’s Russia Tower, which at more than 2,000 feet will be the tallest skyscraper in Europe when it’s finished in 2012.

In this case, it’s hard to tell if Foster means to tweak his client’s ambitions by giving Crystal Island such a medieval, even paranoid cast. But would it matter much, on balance, if he were? That kind of winking irony, which may allow architects working for autocrats and their associates to sleep better at night, will be meaningless to the Russians who live in or visit the building, overwhelmed by the sheer spectacle of the soaring interior spaces.

You could make the same point about many new pieces of architecture, of course, in cities from Las Vegas to Shanghai. But rarely has a high-profile design been quite so straightforward about its desire to give the newly wealthy a protected, luxurious and full-service world unto themselves -- mountain and mountaintop rolled into one.

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christopher.hawthorne@latimes.com