Some buildings are entered on the protected lists, while others are quietly demolished, the features of old Moscow being ever more thoroughly wiped from the face of the city

Some buildings are entered on the protected lists, while others are quietly demolished, the features of old Moscow being ever more thoroughly wiped from the face of the city. Over the past weekend the Dukhovsky apartment house at 19 Bolshoy Levshinsky Lane was razed to the ground.

The house, built in 1904 to a design by the architect Ivan Meisner, had no protected status. A new-build block will rise on the site of the four-storey Art Nouveau apartment house.

The plot of land in Bolshoy Levshinsky Lane was owned by the jurist Mikhail Vasilyevich Dukhovsky. An ordinary professor of Moscow University, he was the foremost specialist in criminal law and the founder of Russian criminology. His sons, the physician Mikhail Mikhailovich Dukhovsky and the historian Vladimir Mikhailovich Dukhovsky, after their father's death in 1903 erected the apartment house in Bolshoy Levshinsky on the land they had inherited.

First the house was thoroughly neglected and long offered for sale; then talk began of adding four storeys on top of it, while restoration, for some reason, was never even mentioned; and now, all at once, it is gone. Moscow is losing valuable elements of its historic urban fabric. One might rather have turned to the hideous functionalist nine- and twelve-storey blocks, the fruits of Khrushchev-era building, which plainly disfigure the skyline; but developers have an appetite for small-flat, low-rise, super-profitable projects.