The renewed Circus on Fontanka is due to open on December 1, 2015, but officials responsible for construction no longer rule out the possibility that this date may be moved.

Photo: RBC SPB

Now the North-Western Construction Directorate of the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation (the technical customer of the project) is trying to obtain the necessary documents from the Committee for State Control, Use and Protection of Monuments of St. Petersburg (KGIOP), and this, as it turns out, is becoming a real problem.

Problem for the city

“We cannot yet obtain permission from KGIOP. Considering that we are opening on December 1, permits are needed like air,” the head of the directorate, Alexander Shabasov, told reporters today. The main difficulty arose in connection with the “non-standard decisions” taken during construction work. So, the circus should have a second roof, which will be located above the existing one. As A. Shabasov noted, the new roof will be located at the historical mark - 2.6 meters higher than the existing one, which sank during operation. The new structure will take on the full weight of modern technical equipment and will be responsible for the functionality of the building. The old dome will be located under it.

As the official noted, every week of delay now is plus a month of work at the end of the year. “We need to receive documents for the work in the coming week. If not, then we are behind schedule and the opening of the circus on December 1 becomes a problem,” said Sergei Vazhenin, acting director of the circus.

So far, the reconstruction of the building is not progressing quickly, the circus leaders admitted. Now emergency response work has been completed at the site and a temporary dome has been built. “The reinforced concrete structures were removed from the dome in order to avoid emergency situations, and a temporary roof was installed for drainage. Unfortunately, that’s all for now,” noted A. Shabasov.

The project faces limitations in electrical and thermal capacity. A. Shabasov said that they had already turned to the Minister of Culture Vladimir Medinsky and the Governor of St. Petersburg Georgy Poltavchenko for financial assistance in solving this problem.

In addition, the circus needs new gas consumption capacities. We are talking about increasing gas consumption and converting the boiler house to new capacities (the cost of this work is estimated at 40 million rubles). Officials have not yet announced at whose expense this work will be carried out.

What will happen

The artistic director of the Fontanka Circus, Vyacheslav Polunin, in turn, described the future of the St. Petersburg circus after its opening. “The main thing is to restore what was under Ciniselli, because everything disappeared during Soviet times. And then we will see how possible it is to develop further in this style,” he noted. “We will restore both the space of the hall and the number of chairs as under Ciniselli, so that beauty will return again, because before that there was such a simple Khrushchev technology to swell more people into the circus.” By the way, he denied information that had previously appeared in the media that the St. Petersburg circus could be left without animals. The technical specifications for the project for the updated circus on the Fontanka contain both elephant shelters and stables.

Reference

The Fontanka Circus was built in 1877. In September 2014, work began on major repairs and restoration of the main circus building. The project was developed back in 2008 by the design organization Novy Gorod LLC, but due to lack of funding its implementation was postponed.

As a result, reconstruction began only last year. The Moscow FSUE Atex of the Federal Security Service of Russia (FSO) was chosen as the contractor, which won the competition, offering to carry out the work for 771.8 million rubles. Later, the company transferred the contract to a subcontractor, BaltStroy CJSC, which requested 751 million rubles for its work.

BaltStroy is part of the Forum holding company, whose owners, according to Forbes, are Dmitry Mikhalchenko and Nikolai Negodov. N. Negodov is a retired FSB major general, and D. Mikhalchenko participated in the creation of the ANO “Administration of the Affairs of the FSB Support Fund.”

The bureaucracy stood in the way of the reconstruction of the Circus on Fontanka