Yesterday, several strong storms clashed above the small town of Krasnozavodsk of the Moscow region. The resulting tornado shredded through the town, overturning cars, uprooting trees and destroying homes. After devastating Krasnozavodsk, the tornado tore through the landscape 30 miles outside of Russia's capital.

Construction boom transformed Moscow over the last decade and some of the newer buildings there do look like cocks (thank you, Curbed.com!.) But lately, after the high oil prices building rush is over, developers aim for beauty rather than masculinity. Here are twelve new buildings that were put up for the "Building of the year" award.

I read an architecture story once where a preservationist was asked to comment on the demolition of an old public library in Brooklyn. “It was not a major work,” she said tactfully. Translation: it was ugly, and we have to pick our battles. It was an attitude I wish Moscow’s preservationists had adopted on Tuesday rather than taking to the streets in defense of the Central House of Artists, a museum complex that houses two major galleries. For one thing, these activists should be conserving their negligible political capital for buildings they have a chance of saving. For another, the Central House of Artists is an awful building that deserves to be torn down.

No, that’s not the sound of Fyodor Dostoevsky rolling in his grave; they’re just drilling tunnels 200 feet below the 19th-century writer’s historical childhood street. By 2010, Moscow will have a new author-themed metro station—Dostoevskaya—whose interior design might very well send depressives scouring their pockets for extra Zoloft.

Don't look now, Stalin's skyscrapers, but there's a new, equally unsettling panorama in town: Moskva-Siti (literally Moscow-City) is a cluster of angular skyscrapers that, when completed, will be the Putin generation's futuristic monument to papa ruble. In the thin fog of a mild January, it looks positively dystopian. But there's one lingering question: Why on earth does it have a blue, digital clock tower?