In order to make better sense of this project, we need to consider a small backstory and the story of this place.

The city of Omsk, since its founding in 1716, for almost 200 years developed around a military fortress garrison. The first fortress was a small one, and was situated on the left bank of the Om’ River; in the 1770s it was replaced by a larger one on the right bank, with an area of 30 hectares, and surrounded by powerful bastions. By the early 20th century nearly all the walls were lost, except for a small fragment in the western part. The fortress was left with stone vaulted gates, a brig, a governor’s office, and some garrison buildings interspersed with a variety of later additions. There was also a parade ground that was later turned into the Exhibition Park.

Thermal Power Station 1

In 1915, the land lying between the border of the main fortress and behind the ramp of the Podgorny Vorstadt, where the Kolpakovskaya Street ran at that time, and the bank of the river, saw the start of the construction of the city’s first thermal power station designed by Nikolai Kudryavtsev. They did not complete the station by 1917 (the year of the so-called “Great October Socialist Revolution”) – the building was only completed in 1918, and the power station began to produce electricity in 1921. Lenin himself sent for it a generator all the way down from Moscow (the history of the station and the footage of those years can be seen here and here).

The power station was shut down in 1986, the equipment was moved out in 1988, and since then this neo-Roman building with Lombard arches stands deserted and is consumed by slow decay, even though it does bear the status of a cultural heritage site of regional importance.

The developer, JSC “Center for Construction Projects”, owns the power station building and the vacant lot to the east of it; currently, there are a couple of driving practice facilities there. The southern border of the site goes to the embankment, beyond the eastern border is Voskresensky Park, while the northern one runs along Partizanskaya Street, on the opposite, right side of which are quite imposing neoclassical quarters occupied mainly by educational institutions, such as the University College of Agribusiness and the Financial University; the two city blocks are separated by the Museum Street, on which there are two significant buildings: a branch of the Hermitage and the Museum of Education.

The north corner of the site faces the Omsk tower; along the west border stretches the building of the barracks of the 63rd Siberian Rifle Regiment, built in 1903 and added a third floor in 2007, an architectural heritage site, and the HQ of Omskenergo. This building is not included in the boundaries of the land site, while a small 1938 building standing next to the river is.

If we are to take a wider look, we will see that the city around the site is very mottled. Neoclassical clarity is rather characteristic of the above-mentioned blocks in the eastern part of Partizanskaya Street, while the territory of the fortress is occupied by a variety of buildings interspersed by greenery. Late 18th-century buildings, a cathedral restored in 2016, bourgeois and industrial historicism, and authorial modernism, such as the Dzerzhinsky House, are mixed with 1930s and 1970s administrative buildings, schools, hospitals, and lots of Soviet- and post-Soviet-era residences. West of the site, along the waterfront, there is a funny “slice” house from the 1990s and a Soviet-era swimming pool; the wide paved road along the waterfront is rather deserted. In short, the environment we are used to associating with the historic center is found here rather fragmentally. Meanwhile, the old fortress remains the historical center of the city – some say even the spiritual center – and discussions about building in the center are very intense.

The Debate

The heated debates over the Thermal Power Station site have been going on for a long time and have recently grown into serious protests by city preservation activists, which are widely covered in the local press. At the moment, their main topic is the protest against residential development in any form. The arguments are: the residents will enclose the area with a fence, they will “clog the place up with their cars”, and worsen the traffic situation. Occasionally, the profits from the sale of housing are also mentioned. The second theme we would like to define as protectionist: sometimes in the discussion it is said that Omsk must be developed by Omsk architects, which is also a humanly understandable emotion. The leader of opponents of residential development of Thermal Power Station 1 is the architect Nikita Shalmin, head of Omsk branch of All-Russian Society for the Preservation of Historical and Cultural Monuments.

Supporters of the construction also have about two arguments: first, the territory is already fenced and has been excluded from city life for 30 years already, and if the debates end up nowhere, it is unclear how much longer it will remain in such a state; second, the customer promises to invest part of the money from the sale of housing in the reconstruction of Thermal Power Station 1 and its transformation into a cultural and social center of the city. “It’s a fence in the center of Omsk. I would like to see there functions that are useful instead, be that a residential or a public function”– says Natalia Starchenkova, chief architect of the Omsk region.

Regarding the fence and the prospects of development of the territory, the head of the Omsk branch of the Union of Architects Saken Husainov agrees with her: “I do not think that this development should be postponed for the long term. Otherwise, there is a risk of leaving the territory of the city abandoned, the way it has always been” (see his interview). But Khusainov does not like everything in the proposed project. And here it is hard to tell how much of this position is justified by stylistic considerations, and how much by protectionist ones – because the current project at the moment is a Moscow-supplied one.

In 2021, the owner of the land site invited the Moscow-based ASADOV Architects to come up with their vision of the project – they were recommended as the authors of the “Russian Europe” concept in Kaliningrad, among other things.

The head of the company, Andrey Asadov, described the task as a sensible one, even noble to some extent.

Andrey Asadov, ASADOV architects

Our task was to “reload” the urban environment in this place, and to give it an opportunity for further development. The client himself came up with the initiative to restore Thermal Power Plant 1 and turn it into a cultural and social space. It is worth mentioning that such social initiatives are not always found during the renovation of industrial zones – it is not uncommon to see residential or office lofts built in former industrial buildings, even if such buildings have restaurants on the first floor.

In this case, we needed a ratio of “public spaces open to everyone” / “enclosed residential spaces” of 35 to 65. And we did that. We studied several projects offered for this place during the last 30 years and we tried to develop all the useful ideas that had appeared there: the continuation of the beams of the neighboring city streets inside the building, the deepened square in front of the power station building with the unearthed first floor, the division of the building into three blocks, the pedestrian bridge across the Om’ River, the restoration of the chimney that was lost during the Soviet times. The territory was considered for so long and so closely by our colleagues that the most striking stories had already appeared somewhere, one way or another.

There were things that we interpreted, of course, in our own way. We carefully studied foreign and Russian experience of modern buildings in the historic center: Hamburg, Copenhagen, Kaliningrad, St. Petersburg, Arkhangelsk, Perm, Sergey Skuratov’s project in Minsk. We are also guided by the examples of the creation of cultural centers in the historical city – Tate Modern, MAAT in Lisbon and a number of others, and, of course, the Hydraulic Power Station (GES-2) in Moscow. Our Thermal Power Station looks recognizably like GES-2 in old photographs and it seems to me that it is one of the good prototypes.

The customer, from my point of view, is a man of noble cause in many ways. First of all, he wants to give this part of the area back to the city, and he wants to restore and revitalize the monument. Secondly, he himself initiated a public discussion, which is quite painful for the project and personally for him. The example of the neighboring site is quite different: there, the owners simply negotiated with someone behind the scenes for more height.