Architects Try to Save the Shabolovka radio tower in Moscow - NYTimes.com
▻http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/17/arts/design/an-engineering-landmark-faces-demolition-in-moscow.html?emc=edit_th_2014031
One of the great feats of 20th-century engineering, a landmark of modernist architecture is facing demolition. Late last month, the Russian State Committee for Television and Radio Broadcasting agreed to the dismantling of the Shabolovka radio tower in Moscow.
http://static01.nyt.com/images/2014/03/16/arts/16tower1/16tower1-master495.jpg http://static01.nyt.com/images/2014/03/16/arts/16tower2/16tower2-superJumbo.jpg This is the Eiffel Tower of Russia, a 50-story conical structure of steel latticework, shaped roughly like a collapsing telescope, designed by the engineer Vladimir Shukhov. Commissioned by Lenin and completed in 1922, the tower was intended to spread the word of Communism through the new radio technology and to stand for the regime’s revolutionary ambition. Supported on a shallow ring of concrete, the tower is a diaphanous web rising into the sky. Only a shortage of materials thwarted plans to make it more than twice as tall — higher than Gustave Eiffel’s earlier creation in Paris. Even at that greater height, Shukhov’s construction was so efficient and elegant that his tower would have been a quarter of the Eiffel Tower’s weight.