The following May, Gergiev invited Diamond to New York, where he showed him Perrault’s scheme as well as other proposals for the Mariinsky. Diamond was critical. He said the dramatic exteriors had nothing to do with the interiors. Gergiev then invited him to St. Petersburg. He told him Perrault had been fired and asked Diamond to do a design for the Mariinsky. “Draw me a picture,” he said.

“I don’t work like that,” Diamond said.

“I need pictures to show Putin.”

Diamond’s office put together a scheme in five weeks, using the people who had worked on the Four Seasons Centre, and the Harman Center for the Arts in Washington, DC. The Mariinsky had historical and cultural import, and Diamond, the seventy-seven-year-old founder of DSAI, saw it as a coup. It was a high-profile commission that would cement the firm’s growing international reputation. The design team employed some of the tropes from the Four Seasons: the transparency and overhangs, the floating glass stairway, the contextual qualities of the exterior. “Be bolder,” Gergiev said when he saw the drawings.

The bolder version acknowledged the scale of the existing area at the cornice line, but also had a soaring, canopied roofline. “It was the classical problem of them wanting to be bold, but wanting a building that fits in,” Diamond said.

The issue of whether the Mariinsky should be a dramatic, singular statement or a contextual building that fit in with St. Petersburg’s stunning architectural landscape was a particularly delicate one. When Eric Owen Moss’s radical design was rejected, St. Petersburg’s chief architect, Oleg Kharchenko, said the building was a repudiation of Russian history. “You, who have lived in this city for so long, your ancestors who created this city, you did it all the wrong way,” he said. “The right way is this empty nonsense.” The Russians appeared to want the impact a Guggenheim-like sculpture might bring, but wanted their heritage to be recognized and respected as well. (Moss suggested that not only did they not know what they wanted, but they were no longer sure who they were. “Are we a western country; are we an eastern country? Are we a democracy? I don’t think they’ve figured it out,” he told me.)

It was into this conundrum that Diamond+Schmitt arrived. The firm had effectively received the commission from Gergiev, though neither he nor the Mariinsky itself was formally in the political loop. They were users, not clients, and had influence but no actual power. So the commission was a tenuous one.

And in the brief interval between Perrault’s firing and Gergiev’s unilateral hiring of DSAI, another version was being worked on. TDM, a theatre supply company that held the contract to supply the Mariinsky, had hired German acousticians Müller-BBM for the project. Müller asked who the architect was, and was told “we don’t have one,” so they hired an architectural firm they had been working with in Italy, Alvisi Kirimoto+Partners, which was then employed to modify the Perrault scheme.

As a result, the first video conference with DSAI and the ViPS Group, the Russian architecture and engineering firm that is essentially acting as the architect of record, was a surreal tour through the dark soul of Russian bureaucracy. Jack Diamond and principal architect Gary McCluskie (who looks a bit like the actor Alec Baldwin squeezed into a much slimmer frame) tried to present their drawings of the auditorium, but were rebuffed by ViPS. “There is no point in showing us these drawings, because we have an auditorium and we are building it” was their emphatically stated position. To which Diamond and McCluskie responded that they were now the architects, there was a new scheme, and here it was. This went back and forth for four hours without any movement. The bottom line was that ViPS had no interest in wading back into the bureaucracy in order to get new contracts, new documents, and new signatures from party holdovers who had a Kafkaesque appreciation of bureaucracy. In the meantime, they continued to work on a version of the Perrault scheme, one that would be shorter, less intrusive aesthetically, and without the glass dome of the original.

The process of working in St. Petersburg was like going down the rabbit hole. Everything was familiar, yet distorted. DSAI didn’t really have a client, or a contract, and didn’t have the pertinent fire or building codes. As it happens, there are two main building codes for St. Petersburg, SNIP and GOST, and it wasn’t clear which one was being used; and the dialogue among the theatre consultants was like a David Mamet play.

“They sent us fifty-seven regulations, but not the theatre codes.”

“I can see this guy at the meeting. He’s got the theatre code. He won’t give it to us. I ask how wide an aisle has to be. Guy says two and a half metres. Other guy is shaking his head, no.”

“No one in St. Petersburg is talking SNIP.”

“They’re talking GOST.”

“GOST looks like someone’s Ph.D. thesis. I mean, it’s a theory.”

Gary McCluskie discussed the auditorium design with Christopher Pomorski, the deputy director of ViPS. After an hour of unconstructive dialogue, Pomorski said solemnly, “Jack Diamond is ambitious man. Every architect is ambitious.” Pause. “Some people in St. Petersburg, they are also ambitious.” A Russian shrug. What to make of this? A message to be cautious when dealing with local authorities. Diamond was persistent, and he had Gergiev as an ally, but bureaucracy is a powerful force, and for the next several months it appeared to be winning the battle.