The Garage Centre of Contemporary Art will have a branch in St Petersburg

New vast project will be sited on St Petersburg’s New Holland island by the company Millhouse Capital UK Ltd the part of business empire of Roman Abramovich. He will spend £256m in renovation and construction works according to investment contract. Roman Abramovich intends to build a multi-purpose complex on New Holland by 2017. It will cover 123,000 square yards, including the island’s five restored federal architectural monuments (65,000 square yards), with construction of an additional area of almost 18,000 square yards to the adjoining buildings.

There will be:

- 21,000 square yards of 
office space

- 29,000 square yards of residential apartments

- a boutique hotel (5,000 square yards)

- 18,000 square yards of commercial space and restaurants

- 9,000 square yards of museums and art galleries

- parking for 643 vehicles

Roman Ambramovich will run the island for seven years. Thereafter, the island’s communications, two new bridges connecting to it, as well as 1,500 square yards of exhibition space, will become the property of the city. Everything else will stay with the investor. 

The works under the project are in the process and the only information which has already been announced that in the biggest building at the corner of the streets Moyka and Krukova will be the cultural center were the branch of the Garage Centre of Contemporary Art of Moscow will be situated.

An artificial island built in 1721 by Peter the Great as Russia’s first military port, New Holland has always been a symbol of St Petersburg, especially because of its majestic 23-metre arch designed by the French architect Jean-Baptiste Vallin de la Mothe. From that arch, vessels could slip along canals to the Neva river, and from there to the Gulf of Finland and the Baltic Sea.

In the 1730s, warehouses were built for the drying and storing of timber for building ships. More recently, those warehouses belonged to the Leningrad Military and Sea Base. Off-limits to the public in Soviet times, the territory was handed over to the city of St Petersburg only in 2004.

Meanwhile, as any great project the renovation of New Holland meets a lot of critical remarks. For instance, the World Monuments fund mentions that recently there were destroyed radio station, which was used by communist to announce their win in 1917 and research laboratory of Dmitry Mendeleev. That objects were not protected by the state and formally there were no reasons to leave them on the territory of islands.

Finally, in case there some objective losses of some historical buildings and obvious commercial trend of hole project there is one doubtless plus of this investments that there will be created new site where the modern art could be represented and it should be only welcomed.

 By Svetlana Morgoshiya