View from Moscow: as capitalism makes its presence felt in Russia, Moscow has become an architectural boomtown, capital of the new Wild East. Catherine Cooke pulls on her fur coat to survey developments. (View).

From its historic centre out to the wooded periphery, Russia's capital is awash with new buildings and as locals say, more rise constantly 'like mushrooms after rain' in any available space. Any student of the city's twentieth-century planning history inevitably recalls the preamble to Stalin's great modernizing plan of 1935. 'In contrast to cities of the capitalist world', it declared, 'Moscow must not permit the extreme concentration on small sites of great masses of population, enterprises, clubs, shops, eating places and so on.' Stalin opened up its ancient fabric with six-lane highways which traffic engineers still cannot tame and the eighty-year absence of a land market has left central areas of charming low-rise Classicism highly vulnerable. As capitalism returns, very big money, Russian and foreign, is panting to exploit them to a degree commensurate with the 'global city' aspirations of Mayor Luzhkov and his planners.

'Population' and its multifarious 'enterprises' are now fighting over every cubic metre of the fabric. Their entertainments are less decorous than socialism would have approved and their eating places are excellent beyond the dreams of that time. But they all demand building work on a scale that has made construction very profitable. Techniques have undergone a much-needed diversification and finishing skills have been revived to create a healthy basis for the next and perhaps more mature stage. Everywhere the energy is palpable; architects and developers complain about the bureaucratic permissions needed to get on site, but maybe that barrier has merit if it applies some brakes to the pace of change.

Gradually initiatives of the 1999 Structure Plan are kicking in. A conservation area now protects the historic centre around the Kremlin as far as such edicts can: infill, updating and change-of-use produce the same dilemmas everywhere. A new 'Third Ring Road' is already under construction as the generator of redevelopment in the disused industrial areas of what were once the city's north-eastern out-skirts. Here textile and metal industries were established in the eighteenth century and remained through Soviet times. Jumped over by the explosion of mass housing under Khrushchev and since, this vast arc will be the site of new sub-centres with retail, office, education and other services to unload the historic core. Le Corbusier told the city in 1931 that no metropolis could operate with all its government functions, retailing, higher education, medical facilities and monuments overlaid in one tiny central area. This is now to be unpacked as Moscow becomes genuinely polycentric at last. As this work takes off and a new spatial framework for investment is established, the building opportunities of the next decade will be even vaster than those since 1991.

So far, investment zones like the much advertised 'Moscow City' just up river of the historic core have not proved the honeypots to foreign capital the planners had hoped. In December, the results of a competition were announced which they hope may turn the tide. Part of the new 'Siti' is to become a $250 million governmental quarter unifying the scattered bureaucracy. A vast city hall complex combining Council (Duma) functions and administrators went to open competition and attracted an international field of 147 entries, Conducted in proper anonymity, it was eventually won by 'The Stool', a 52-storey complex of four cylindrical towers linked by a complex of bridges and atria for occupation, as Mayor Luzhkov demands, by the end of 2004.

In several respects this event shows how the wind is blowing. The Rossiiskaya Gazeta headline insisted that 'The achievements of the competition are more important than the future "Stool"'. As Moscow Chief Architect Kuzmin stressed, 'For the first time in 70 years we have at last conducted a genuine competition to the highest professional standards. This means that our capital is now open for masters of architecture from across the entire world'. Alexander Kudriavtsev, President of the Academy of Architecture (and Rector of the Moscow School) added, 'We'd like to believe that this competition will be the model for many more that will bring a genuinely twenty-first century architecture to Moscow'. In light of the detailed decisions that statement is interesting, as a significant minority of the jury preferred a scheme by Israeli architects Michael Walma, Daniel Mintz and Leonardo Kelijman that replicated elements of the Kremlin walls and this rhetorical scheme was retained 'for use elsewhere in the Moscow City site'.

It is cheering that the entirely unrhetorical 'Stool' proved to come from a trio of quite young Russians, Mikhail Khazanov, Anton Nagavitsyn and Nodar Kancheli. Their leader, Mikhail Khazanov, was one of the so-called Paper Architects whose protest schemes of the early 1980s exerted powerful pressure for change on the stagnant Soviet profession. Many of his colleagues have prosperous practices in private residential work for clients whose business success can buy them homes as unconstrained and un-Soviet as the design talent of their contemporaries can produce. Reviving the historic name of the Moscow Architectural Society, MAO, some of these offices like Dmitri Velichkin's have formed an alliance of practices to share experience as a new profession shapes itself. Others like Alexander Asadov are tackling the housing stock elsewhere, in pioneering projects to update the legacy of five-storey Stalinist blocks.

Dissidents of an earlier phase are also prolific. The elderly Abdulla Akhmedov was famed in the early 1970s for his radical regionalism in Turkmenia. Now in Moscow, his work brings that ebullience to the use of historical references which has characterized Russian building over the centuries. The historical motifs of Boris Tkhor's theatre for the School of Dramatic Art are quieter, but all this new work shows a surer handling of scale and complexity than the first-wave attempts at a Moscow style in the mid-1990s. As Khazanov knows, because his mother is a famous historian of it, Modernism is equally a Moscow style. In that spirit, the buoyant little Anglo-Russian office of James McAdam and Tanya Kalinina, former directors of Will Alsop's Moscow operation, has a major new department store about to go on site between the famous complexes of Le Corbusier's Tsentrosoyuz and Shchusev's Agriculture Ministry. Not far away its miniature predecessor, the Vesnin brothers' elegant Mostorg department store of 1927, has b een boldly but sympathetically updated by Benetton. Notions of the mass consumer have changed over the intervening decades but the vigour of Moscow architecture is genuinely the same.