Photos by Alexey Mayshev
It
looks like a Moscow evening from inside the TGIF restaurant on Pushkin Square,
even though it is daytime. There are plenty of windows, yet something stops the
sun from coming in.
The building’s facade is sheathed in an advertisement for a Sochi
ski resort, covering most of the early 20th-century Constructivist building on
two sides. The ad, which shows two skiers on the mountain, has the appearance
of Soviet nostalgia.
Just across the street, another building is shrouded on two sides with an
advertisement for Chanel. Huge neon ads top buildings around the square.
Twenty years ago, a sign on top of a building was a Soviet exhortation to work
harder, but Moscow has taken advertising to such an extreme that even business
executives say the city has descended into “visual chaos.” Moscow is drowning
in its advertising-legal, illegal-on roofs, on sidewalks, straddling streets,
down the sides of high-rises and pumping neon day and night.
How
to reform visual blight
The new city government, which took over after long-term mayor
Yuri Luzhkov was fired last year, has vowed to reduce the amount of outdoor
advertising in Moscow by 20 percent by the start of 2013, and city officials
want much of the historical center to be completely cleared of ads.
“Historical buildings should rule, and not ad constructions in the central
postcard area with its panorama views,” said Konstantin Mikhailov, an advocate
with the architectural preservation group Archnadzor. “It is all because of a
desire to get the most money out of every square foot in the city.”
Pushkin Square could be Moscow’s equivalent of New York’s Time Square or
London’s Piccadilly Circus. But the ads are so ubiquitous that traveling
through the center feels like going from one Time Square to another.
The senses are also bombarded by huge video screens and rows of
banners that cross over streets, creating a tunnel of ads for traffic just
underneath.
“Advertisements have conquered civilization,” Albina Kholina wrote in a Russian
literary journal. She compared the banners to “knickers drying on a balcony.”
And many of the ads are illegal. Last January, the city took down 33 of the
“pirate” ads, but the lack of concrete action against those who put them up has
fueled more suspicion of city corruption.
Maxim Tkachev, the head of News Outdoor, one of the biggest players on the
market, said he and other companies have the “feeling that the city is not
interested in transparency and order” in outdoor advertising.
“The flagrant breaking of federal law, Moscow rules and selective application
of them has created the visual chaos that we see now,” Tkachev wrote in a
comment sent to Russia Now.
He pointed to the fact that one of the ads that appeared to be illegal was
situated exactly opposite the Moscow City offices. News Outdoor said that a
crackdown on illegal ads would cut advertising by 20 percent on its own.
The previous city official in charge of supervising outdoor advertising was
arrested and charged with corruption. His case is still ongoing, but he has
been replaced under the new mayor.
One expert who follows the market was optimistic about the city’s plans under
Sergei Sobyanin, the new mayor. ”The first step has already happened around
the Kremlin and the Novodevichy cemetery,” said Andrei Beryozkin, head of
Espar-Analitik, which analyzes outdoor advertising in the city.
But it is an ongoing battle. Last summer, even the ground was covered with ads
as companies used graffiti-style tactics to cover sidewalks. Legislation has
been proposed in the State Duma, the lower house of parliament, to impose large
fines to stop the pavement ads.
Apartment dwellers in the dark
Officially, two thirds of an apartment building’s residents must
give permission before advertising can drape their home, and the money made
from renting out a facade is supposed to go to building repairs.
When residents of a building on the elite street Kutuzovsky Prospekt found
their light blocked by an Infiniti car ad, they were not compensated.
“Our flats are in semidarkness during the day and a bright electric light flows
in the window at night,” residents wrote in a letter to President Dmitry
Medvedev last year, which claimed that the advertisers were paying $1 million a
year.
Residents in that building - where Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev lived in
the 1970s without any neon light disturbing his sleep - succeeded in
getting the ad removed.
But pity any flat owners near Smolenskaya Square, where the Golden Ring hotel
turns its 23- floor facade into a hyperactive neon light show every night.
“It’s tacky, annoying and it can’t be good for the environment,” said Masha, a
resident.
The city vowed that future funds from ads will go toward repairs and
restoration of the buildings they are hung on.
“The problem is not just the ads,” Mikhailov said. “It’s the fact that the city
does not have a concept for how the city should look.”
There is an official city artist, an official architect and committees
ostensibly responsible for city planning, but there is no visual plan for
development, he said.
“I would just like to see the city that I live in,” wrote Kholina, who said the
change in the city becomes apparent when a Moscow resident gives directions.
“Turn left after Toyota, there you will see L’Oreal, and after Pepsi turn right
… for the house where Sony is.”
All rights reserved by Rossiyskaya Gazeta.
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