Sounds fanciful? They start building it next month. It will open in June 2006 and it has been designed by Britain’s Norman Foster.
Lord Foster, 69, has been hailed for some audacious buildings in his time, from the “gherkin” office for Swiss Re in London to Beijing’s new airport, currently the world’s biggest construction site. He even survived London’s “wobbly bridge” embarrassment. But nothing he has done to date compares with this latest commission. Nobody asks for buildings like this unless they happen to be President Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan.
With a massive oil, gas and mineral industry behind him, western investors eager to catch his eye and not much by way of political opposition, Nazarbayev can build whatever he wants in his showpiece new capital of Astana.
With Foster’s building he hopes to trumpet religious and ethnic reconciliation. He also wants an opera house to rival Covent Garden, a national museum of culture, a new “university of civilisation” and a centre for Kazakhstan’s ethnic and geographical groups. All these will be housed inside Foster’s pyramid, which is 203ft high and has a square base 203ft wide, sitting on a 50ft high artificial mound.
This is not just a talking shop for clerics. Although, with a population split 50:50 between Russian Orthodox and Muslim and with extremism on the rise, it is not surprising that religion is on the president’s mind. He held his first congress of religious leaders in September 2003 and wants to make it a triennial event.
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The pyramid, made of a diamond-pattern lattice of steel clad in pale silver-grey stone, will be topped by a coloured apex of abstract modern stained glass to be designed by the British artist Brian Clarke — a long-time friend of and collaborator with Foster. Bathed in the golden and pale blue glow of the glass (colours taken from the Kazakhstan flag), 200 delegates from the world’s main religions will meet every three years in a circular chamber — based on the United Nations security council meeting room in New York.
The chamber is perched high beneath the point of the pyramid on four huge props intended, said Foster, to “symbolise the hands of peace”.
A research centre into the world’s religions, complete with a large library, occupies the floor below.
For the public, things are no less spectacular. Inside the hill at the base is the 1,500-seat opera house. The auditorium has a circular glass ceiling set in the floor of the pyramid’s gargantuan central atrium. From the floor of the sunken opera house to the peak of the pyramid is nearly 250ft. Lifts rising up the inward-leaning walls — rather like the legs of the Eiffel Tower — carry you up to a middle level.
At this point more drama begins as you enter what Foster’s colleagues call “the hanging gardens of Astana”. The atrium walls flare outwards, vegetation cascades on all sides from planters set into the walls. To get up to the unearthly light pouring down from the top of the pyramid, you must walk up zig-zag ramps through the gardens as if ascending to heaven.
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Even Foster — not a demonstrative man — can hardly believe that he has this job. “A few months ago this didn’t exist,” he said as we stood in his studio in Battersea, south London, in front of a 6ft tall working model of the pyramid. The building’s cost is a state secret, but if it were built in Britain it would cost hundreds of millions of pounds.
“It’s the fastest thing we’ve ever done. They’ve ordered the steel and it starts to be built next month. The scale of what is happening in Astana is incredible.”
So rapid has it been that Foster has yet to meet Nazarbayev, 64, a former steel worker who has led the country since independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. When the job first arrived, said Foster, he was away in France, faxing design ideas back to the office.
Nigel Dancey and David Nelson, his fellow directors, have presented the designs in Nazarbayev’s new presidential palace, which the pyramid will face across the River Ishim on a new three-mile boulevard.
The president works surrounded by models of the new Astana. He is pouring billions of dollars into it — despite the reported reluctance of his ministers, and international airlines, to move there from the old capital of Almaty near the Chinese border. “It’s fairly bleak and very new,” said Dancey. “It’s growing so quickly that it hasn’t really found its own identity yet. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
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The climate is one problem. Temperatures in Astana range from minus-40C in winter to plus-40C in summer.
Foster chose the pyramid shape because it has no negative religious connotations. “It is primarily a cultural centre, but because it will host a peace congress of 18 religions it becomes something else. It is about religion, peace and coexistence,” he said. “It is dedicated to the renunciation of violence and the promotion of faith and human equality.”