The building of the Odessa Regional Philharmonic Society (originally Odessa New Exchange) is an architectural monument of national importance. Its restoration will be carried out by LLC Scientific-Production Center Ecostroy, the company that restored Kirkha (Lutheran Cathedral) and the famous Potemkin Stairs.

The company won the tender announced by the capital construction department of the Odessa Regional State Administration. Scientific and project documentation will cost 5 million 50 thousand UAH. The money was allocated from the regional budget.

In addition to Ecostroy, the tender was attended by LLC Ukrainian Architectural Technologies, owned by the private entrepreneur Varlamov Sergey Vladimirovich and a subsidiary company of Kyivsky prombudproekt.

The director and founder of LLC Ecostroy is Tatiana Sukhanova, the scientific supervisor is the Honoured Builder of Ukraine Vladimir Sukhanov. Previously, the company was engaged in the restoration of the Lutheran Cathedral of St. Paul in Odessa (Novoselsky Street), the repair of the Potemkin Stairs and developed a project for the restoration of the Vorontsov Palace and the Odessa Fine Arts Museum.

It is worth mentioning that the historical building of the New Exchange attracted the attention of President Volodymyr Zelensky during his visit to Odessa in September 2020. The Head of State announced a "large-scale reconstruction" of the building. However, architectural monuments like that can be restored, but not reconstructed, according to the law.

In the same month, the Philharmonic was visited by the Minister of Culture and Information Policy of Ukraine, Oleksandr Tkachenko, who said that the monument should be transferred to State ownership and restored at the expense of the State budget.

To start work, it is necessary to transfer the building to the balance of our Ministry of Culture. We want the Philharmonic to become, like the Odessa Opera, national. And then we will be able to control the process.

Oleksandr Tkachenko, Minister of Culture and Information Policy of Ukraine

Tkachenko promised that the restoration will begin the following year (that is, in the current 2021) with the repair of the ventilation system. All work will cost UAH 150-170 million, and it is planned to complete them in three years, until 2024.

The new exchange was built in 1899 according to the project of Vikentiy Prohaski and Alessandro Bernardazzi with private funds from the Odessa merchants, who even took out a loan. As a result, more than a million rubles were spent on construction, furniture and equipment (a colossal amount for those times, for comparison: the new building of the Opera House cost the city only three hundred thousand more).

Source: Dumskaya.net