The Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg was named for the Empress Maria Alexandrovna, wife of Alexander II, and held its first performance in 1860. It was around this time that Fyodor Dostoevsky was hitting his stride. In 1864, his novel Notes from Underground was published; it is narrated by an unnamed retired civil servant living in St. Petersburg. Dostoevsky had noted the influence of the West on Russian culture: “Why, everything, unquestionably almost everything that we have — of development, science, art, civic-mindedness, humanity, everything, everything comes from there — from that same land of holy wonders!” Dostoevsky was worried that the Russian soul was being displaced by foreign content. His narrator is a spiteful bureaucrat who shares this view and warns that we can’t trust him to tell the truth; he doesn’t even trust himself. Notes from Underground has been called the first existential novel (by Sartre, no less), and it could serve as a guide to the several competitions to build a new Mariinsky Theatre.

The original Mariinsky is picturesque but antiquated, and in 2001 the Russian government decided to build another concert hall — the Mariinsky II — on a site across the narrow canal that once housed the wonderfully Soviet-named Palace of Culture in Honor of the First Five-Year Plan.

The building of the second Mariinsky was called the most important piece of Russian architecture in seventy years. It was important for several reasons. There hadn’t been much notable architecture during that time in Russia, for one. But it was also important as a symbol. One year into Vladimir Putin’s presidency, Russia was stranded between communism and democracy, was struggling economically (though gaining ground quickly through oil exports), and had little cultural imprint outside its borders. But one of its cultural successes was Valery Gergiev, the fifty-six-year-old conductor of both the Mariinsky Theatre Symphony Orchestra and the London Symphony Orchestra, and a regular guest conductor at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York. Gergiev has been artistic director of the Mariinsky (then named the Kirov) since he was thirty-five, a wunderkind who has rock star status in Russia. He is also a friend of prime minister Vladimir Putin, whom he met when Putin was deputy mayor of St. Petersburg. The idea was to build one of the world’s great cultural centres — one that would include the original Mariinsky, a small concert hall (completed now, and called the Mariinsky III), a rehabilitation of the surrounding area, and the centrepiece: the Mariinsky II. The original budget for the concert hall was $100 million, to be paid by the Russian government.

In August 2001, a tender was held for the project, which was won by two American developers who had paired with California architect Eric Owen Moss, whose radical scheme used water and ice as its theme, reflecting St. Petersburg’s canals and its protracted winter. It featured two dramatic, icebergian structures of glass and granite, one of which had a crumpled silhouette that echoed the spires around it. Gergiev initially supported the design, saying, “We’ve got to be radical to attract attention to ourselves.” But it was criticized by both local architects and politicians, and Gergiev’s support waned.

An international architectural competition was then held, with eleven architects invited to submit proposals, among them Eric Owen Moss. In 2003, it was announced that the winner was French architect Dominique Perrault.

During those two years, Russia struggled with democracy. The country’s nascent capitalism was being subverted by oligarchs, the war in Chechnya was escalating, and there was domestic terrorism. Putin chose stability over reform. Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya (who was murdered in 2006) announced “the death of Russian parliamentary democracy,” but it wasn’t clear what had taken its place. The government was a bureaucratic oligarchy with some of the traits of a right-wing dictatorship. On January 13, 2004, a public opinion poll asked, “Which social institutions do you most trust? ” Only 1 percent of Russians trusted political parties; 50 percent trusted Putin; 28 percent trusted nobody; 14 went with the Russian Orthodox Church; 9 for the army; 9 for the government; 5 for the police; and 3 voted for the trade unions. A Russian poll in every respect, its numbers totalled 128 percent. It was an ill-defined time, politically, culturally, even mathematically.

It was also an ill-defined moment in architecture. The Bilbao Effect, the notion taken from Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, that a single dramatic building can change the face of an institution, a city, of a country even, was on the wane. Gehry himself had pronounced it “dead in the water.” But it continued to influence how public buildings were being conceived. It was clear that some Russians, still emerging from the grey Soviet era, had hoped for this kind of international recognition with both Moss’s and Perrault’s designs.

Perrault’s winning entry featured a gold glass canopy settled almost like a fabric on a whimsical dome that echoed the golden spires of St. Petersburg. “We worked like a clothes designer,” Perrault said, “wrapping the building in a sort of veil.” Gergiev was a juror for the competition and made it known that he liked Perrault’s design. “It seemed to be almost a foregone conclusion that Perrault would be the winner,” said jury member Colin Amery, who voted for another entry (the politically adept Gergiev abstained).

There were immediate concerns about both the cost and the practicality of Perrault’s design. How would the dome be constructed? How would all that glass be cleaned? In his final presentation to the jury, Perrault said they would need to use robots. “It’s very experimental,” he said. “On the other hand, it’s very fashionable.”

When Perrault’s design was reviewed by the dense bureaucratic layers of Russia’s regulatory system, there were 286 official objections. “The criticism is of a serious nature,” said a spokesman for the North-Western Directorate for the Construction, Reconstruction, and Restoration of St. Petersburg. “It concerns the building’s stability, its safety, and the absence of coordination between different parts of the projects done by various subcontractors.”

Perrault was fired in January 2007 for reasons that both his office and Russian authorities defined as complex, a collage of architectural, cultural, and economic issues. “At present, Perrault to us is not a world-renowned architect,” said Mikhail Shvydkoi, head of the Federal Agency for Culture and Cinematography, one of the myriad agencies involved in the construction of a cultural building. “He is just a contractor who does not meet his obligations.”

The fact that Perrault’s design was dismissed as impractical and that he had been publicly fired, however, didn’t mean it wouldn’t be built. There were signed documents from all the pertinent agencies and ministries, and that lumbering bureaucratic momentum was difficult to stop. So they began to build.

In early 2007, Valery Gergiev was in Toronto with the Mariinsky Orchestra, and Richard Bradshaw, general director of the Canadian Opera Company, gave him a tour of the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts, designed by Jack Diamond of Diamond+Schmitt Architects (DSAI). Gergiev told Bradshaw he thought it was magnificent. He admired the design, the acoustics, and the budget. On Gergiev’s next visit to Toronto, in December, Bob Ramsay, a communications consultant and one of the sponsors of the Mariinsky Orchestra’s first visit to Canada, in 2001, organized a dinner for him and invited Diamond.

Gergiev was seated beside Diamond, and they chatted for a several hours about music and opera houses and hit it off. At 1:30 a.m., Diamond excused himself, saying he had to work that day. Gergiev said he had to work as well.

“What are you doing? ”

“Conducting War and Peace at the Met.” Gergiev stayed until 3 a.m., drinking and eating, then flew to New York later that day.