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The palace on the Black Sea in the drone video by Alexei Navalny
Photo:
Navalny Life / dpa
Lanfranco Cirillo is sitting in front of the computer in shorts and a polo shirt. It's hot in Dubai, and he's about to go to the sea.
The architect, who has supplied the super-rich Muscovites with villas and Italian living ideas for decades, no longer lives in cold Russia.
He has given up his architecture office there, he says.
But Cirillo's work in Russia has not been forgotten.
This is what the opposition politician Alexej Navalny achieved with his YouTube film "A Palace for Putin".
It is about a luxury estate on the Black Sea that Putin's circle of friends - as Navalny claims - built for the president himself.
The film has been viewed a spectacular 113 million times; according to surveys, a quarter of all Russians have seen it.
The architect of the palace: Lanfranco Cirillo.
“Architecturally speaking, it's not my greatest or my best.
Nice neoclassicism, that was what was needed. "
Architect Cirillo
Cirillo himself calls the project "lush".
“Architecturally speaking, it's not my biggest or my best.
Nice neoclassicism, that was what was needed.
As an architect, I build what the customer wants. «It sounds as if he wanted to distance himself, to justify the bombastic style.
“But it's aesthetically correct and kept in the right historical proportions, not kitsch.
Not overloaded, but of course already lush, that's what it should be.
And we used fantastic materials.
In the end, I was proud of my work.
That is good ›Made in Italy‹. «
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