UrBC, Yekaterinburg, October 26, 2018. Sverdlovsk State Academic Philharmonic canceled the closed meeting that was supposed to have covered a discussion on a new concert hall, political activist Dmitri Moskvin announced via his Facebook account.

The news of the planned meeting transpired last week; it turned out only the so-called members of the ‘Friends of The Philharmonic League’ could sign up for it; the Philharmonic’s website explained this had to do with the limited number of people their auditorium could fit.

‘We do not wish to engage in the ‘open hearings’ format that we are being pressed upon to accept; it is the town council’s business to coordinate those. Nor did we plan to hold a press conference on a new concert hall: it was the Governor’s Information Policy Department that did this,’ the website states.

Now Sverdlovsk Region’s Construction Ministry decided on September 25, 2018 that London-based Zaha Hadid Architects should be the design office to work on the concept for Sverdlovsk Philharmonic’s new concert hall. Their concept proposal covers Clara Zetkin St/Turgenev St/Pervomayskaya St/Karl Liebknecht St, the location where a lived-in apartment building at 40 Karl Liebknecht St is situated. Every version of the proposal starts with pulling the building down. Moreover, some patches of green near the Philharmonic’s historic building will get built over as well.

The town council coordinated a round of public hearings on the project, with seventeen people attending. All of them voted against the current concept proposals. Yekaterinburg Council, however, said the locals’ opinion would not get taken into account.