Russia: With historic buildings the main casualties of Moscow's building boom, one young woman is using her camera to catalogue the demolition, writes Chris Stephen
They say pictures are worth a thousand words, but can they also save a thousand buildings? Daria Mazur hopes so. This Russian student is on a one-woman mission to catalogue scores of historic buildings in Moscow which are earmarked for demolition in the city's rampant building boom.
Oil wealth and a booming economy have fuelled a wild surge of construction in Russia's capital. More than 60 skyscrapers are being built across the city, and planners are using their money to bulldoze through the city's weak planning laws.
Hundreds of historic buildings have already been flattened. A few have had their facades maintained, with the rest of the building being smashed. And until now there has been little public interest in halting the destruction.
Mazur's interest was sparked last year when, working for a government public relations company, she guided foreign architecture specialists around Moscow's redevelopment. With a shock, she realised much of this development was at the expense of her city's heritage.
"I picked up a camera and just started recording everything," she says. "I'm taking pictures to show the history of this city, to show what must be saved, to wave it in front of people's eyes."
An early photograph was of Hotel Moscow, the building featured on bottles of Stolichnaya vodka. The hotel was built in the brutalist Stalinist style but had a quirky feature: the twin towers on either side were of radically different design. The reason, according to Moscow lore, was that Stalin was offered a choice, on the blueprint, of two different styles of tower. Instead, he simply signed the plans and the architects, too terrified to question him, decided to build it as ordered. The result was a unique addition to Moscow's history, until it was torn down last year to make way for a car park.
Mazur photographed the destruction, one shot capturing the ghostly outlines of the building beneath the green shroud of its dust-catching canvas awning.
"Once it is gone, it cannot come back. People need to understand this," she says. "People should realise that they are really losing something, they are losing part of the soul of this city."
Now she has turned her attention to Moscow's unrivalled collection of buildings from the constructivist period.
In the 1920s, the communist revolution seemed to many to herald Utopia. Architects and designers flocked to Moscow, and there was a boom in constructivist architecture with its clean lines and modern feel. The arrival of Stalin choked this optimism, but not before Moscow had been left with Europe's finest collection of constructivist masterpieces. "Constructivists were special, they had to follow only their own thoughts, their own progressive ideas. That makes them free spirits," she says.
Instead of preserving them, the city left its constructivist buildings to rot - with developers salivating over the real estate possibilities once the buildings are declared unsafe and can be knocked down.
The saddest case of all is Narkomfin, a bold 1920s experiment in modern living, now a crumbling ruin. It was built as an attempt to replicate the community of the countryside inside the city.
The idea was to have apartments, offices, shops and even a library in a single building, so that residents were part of one community. "Young people do not know anything about these buildings, and they will not know anything if they are demolished," says Mazur.
As a child she wanted to be an architect, but studied law instead. Now 26, she is back at university, studying photography, and using her free time to catalogue Moscow's vanishing heritage.
Mazur is not alone. In the past year a score of pressure groups, tiny but growing, have sprung up to oppose the destruction. A group of foreign residents has formed the Moscow Architectural Preservation Society (Maps) to take the fight abroad. But they are not hopeful about their chances against the vast fortunes developers have to spend. "There's a flood of money in Moscow, prices are going sky-high," says Clementine Cecil, a co-founder of Maps. "It's becoming a dynamic spot for architects who are running out of places to build elsewhere in Europe."
Others are more upbeat. "The way we are going, we're going to have the youngest historical heritage in the world," complains Aleksei Komech, director of the State Institute of Arts Research, who is campaigning in parliament for tougher planning laws.
Komech once lay down in front of bulldozers to halt development efforts during the time of the Soviet Union. "We managed to convince the communists a little bit," he remembers. "If we could convince them, we can convince these people."
Mazur seems cut from the same cloth as generations of rebels before her, from anarchists to Solzhenitsyn and the writers of Samsizdat publications. "Russians are maybe slow, and not right in some things, but we definitely never give up, that is a trait in our character," she says.
With this in mind, she is creating a one woman exhibition, Endangered Moscow, with the simple aim of showing her fellow Russians the marvels they risk losing. She will also take it abroad - once she finds someone to pay the air fare.