1 · Position
The architect Boris Tkhor proposed in 1991 that the industrial zone on the Presnenskaya embankment — quarries and factories since Soviet times — become a high-rise business centre. The project was approved in 1992 and a management company formed the same year; it still holds the land lease and acts as client for the whole scheme. Work stopped in 1995 for more than ten years for want of investment and resumed after 2003. Infrastructure and the Bagration bridge came first, then the towers: Imperia, the North Tower, Gorod Stolits, then Mercury City and Evolution, then Federation in 2016.
2 · ⚑ What the plan lost
The Library records two changes the promotional accounts pass over. There is no central park: a shopping centre stands where it was to be. And the city government, which was to occupy part of the complex, declined to move its offices there. A district approved in 1992 and delivered over thirty years is not the district that was approved — which is the honest general lesson of this whole group, stated here because Moscow-City states it most plainly.
3 · Why it is in the Library
Twelve billion dollars of it came from private investors rather than the state, on land the state leased out. Read against La Défense — LHL-S-250 La Défense, Paris — the contrast is exact: Paris created a public body in 1958 that expropriated, built and kept extending its own mandate to 2015; Moscow approved a plan, ran out of money, and let private capital finish it a decade late. Both produced a skyline. Only one produced it the way it intended.
4 · Candour
⚑ The hotels within the complex are not established in this entry, which is a gap for a hospitality register and is stated rather than filled. Ownership of the individual towers is dispersed and is not set out here.