Opponents of the demolition have come out in force to decry the plan as a threat to an architectural treasure and a cynical bid to redevelop the area, in a residential part of the bustling neighborhood of Shabolovka. The architect’s great-grandson, also named Vladimir Shukhov, has led a campaign to suggest an alternate method of restoration that would leave the tower intact, reinforcing points of structural weakness without tearing it down. Even if the tower were to be moved, architects have said that that would ruin essential details in Shukhov's original design.

The Russian Ministry of Culture has also agreed that demolition would violate the tower's protected status as a cultural monument. "The government’s actions just show the law isn’t important in Russia," Shukhov's great-grandson says, according to The Calvert Journal, a Russian cultural magazine.

Historian Jean-Louis Cohen and photographer Richard Pare, who have extensively documented the Soviet Union's architectural modernism, have also drafted a petition to Vladimir Putin calling for the structure's preservation, with signatures from a number of elite international architects, including Rem Koolhaas, Liz Diller, and Norman Foster. The latter, whose lattice-clad Gherkin building in London bears echoes of the tower, has called it a "structure of dazzling brilliance and great historical importance." (The petition can be signed at Change.org.)