(China Daily)
Updated: 2008-01-05 11:01

An artist's rendering of the Crystal Island, the world's biggest building to be built in Moscow. [Agencies]

Moscow planners have approved Lord Foster's design for the world's biggest building - likened by critics to an alien spacecraft and a "dahlia stuck in a string bag".

The British architect's $3.96 billion "city within a city", Crystal Island, will be built on the banks of the Moscow River, with a total floor area of 2.5 million sq m, making it the largest enclosed space ever to be constructed.

Crystal Island's steel mega-frame is to feature a "smart skin" to buffer against extreme temperatures and is expected to contain 3,000 hotel rooms, 900 apartments and a school for 500 pupils. Its 620-m-wide base will taper to a spire almost 500 m high, giving it the form of a vast transparent wigwam.

The design was passed despite stiff resistance in planning meetings.

Aleksei Klimenko, a leading member of Moscow's expert council on architecture, said it would overshadow a UNESCO-protected church in the nearby Kolomenskoye district.

The building was too Oriental-looking and resembled a "dahlia stuck in a string bag", he told Radio Svoboda, adding: "If this goes ahead, all that will be left is to build a gold statue of Buddha 30 m away."

Other problems included the density of heavy metals at the site, leached from nearby factories, he said.

Yuri Bocharov, an architect who voted against the project, said: "This idea of Foster's has been wandering all over the world, why does it have to settle on us? It looks as if extraterrestrials have landed in a flying saucer."

The building "contradicted the spirit of the city", he added.

But many would beg to differ.

A Moscow building boom has sent huge steel and glass structures flying up on every skyline. The oil and gas boom has spawned a passion for brash and monumental architecture. Foster is involved in half a dozen big projects in the country, including the Russia Tower, which will be Europe's tallest skyscraper, being built in the new Moskva-Siti business district.

Several city planners praised the Crystal Island development, which will be situated 6.8 km from the Kremlin on the Nagatino peninsula and is due to be finished in 2014. Moscow's mayor, Yuri Luzhkov, said the innovative design differed from the "cubes and squares" of other foreign architects.

On Thursday, Foster predicted the building would become "a year-round destination for Moscow and a sustainable, dynamic new urban quarter".

"It is a paradigm of compact, mixed-use, sustainable city planning, with an innovative energy strategy," he said.

The architect's partnership said daylight would be able to penetrate deep into the interior of the "tent", with external panels opened in summer and closed in winter, when temperatures in Moscow can drop to minus 30 C.

Terraced on the outside of the building will be a series of gardens, and the whole structure is to be set in a landscaped park. The building will house three theaters, an Imax cinema, offices, a museum, two observation decks and underground parking for 14,000 cars.

"At the beginning I understood I'd been shown some kind of Christmas tree," Alexander Kudryavtsev, president of the Moscow Architectural Institute, said.

"But then I thought that such a splendid construction is a fitting demonstration of contemporary technology and all our achievements. This tower could become the symbol of Moscow in the 21st century."