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Fresh water in the city is considered as the most important strategic resource for the existence of mankind. The article reveals religious, mythological and everyday symbols of water as a necessary element of national spiritual cultures. It also describes architectural peculiarities of wells as centers of attraction for citizens, meeting places and magic rituals in different regions of the world. The importance of fresh drinking water as an element of urban infrastructure is emphasized. © 2021 Russian Academy of Architecture and Construction Sciences, Vostoksibacademcenter. All rights reserved

Fire and home: A part of a happy life

One of the former meanings of the Russian word “schastie” (“happiness”) was a portion, a share or a part, and it used to be pronounced as “so-chastie”. To be happy, it is not enough to have a warm house with candles lit on holidays or flames flickering in the fireplace. But such a house is a part of human existence, which constitutes brief moments of bliss. Fire has inhabited the human dwelling since time immemorial, but it has a dual nature. It can be good and evil. It illuminates, blesses and warms. The fire sparkling in fireworks creates an illusion of ascendency over the elements and evokes the mysteries of the cosmos. Torches, candles, lamps, cookers and fireplaces largely determine the architecture of a house. The form and structure of the things associated with fire is a subject of study for art historians and culturologists. Tamed fire is a “so-chastie” of being. © 2022 Russian Academy of Architecture and Construction Sciences, Vostoksibacademcenter. All rights reserved

The binary star

Baroque and classicism were called a binary star. In the national architecture, the avant-garde and neoclassicism can be also called a binary star. The model of succession of styles in architecture does not reflect the real situation in the 1920-1950s. Neoclassicism and different movements of “contemporary architecture” run parallel to each other both in the West and in the USSR. In the 1920s, the avant-garde was brighter, while In the 1930-1950s in the USSR – neoclassicism. “The new world of socialism” was observed in the patterns of “contemporary architecture” by party ideologists headed by Lev Trotsky. In the 1930s, the political situation changed, and the patterns of the “new world” came down to earth and acquired historical roots. The interaction of the avant-garde and neoclassicism produced a unique style of the epoch. Unfortunately, the monuments of that epoch decay very quickly. © 2021 Russian Academy of Architecture and Construction Sciences, Vostoksibacademcenter. All rights reserved

About the Russian and the Russian style

The external and internal image of Russia and the Russian influences the formation of national identity. The search for Russian identity in architecture in the nineteenth century gave rise to numerous artificial “Russian styles” created within the eclectic method. A special role was played by the Byzantine movement, since it was in Byzantium where the roots of Russian culture and Russian nationhood were looked for. A single Russian style does not exist, as well as a German style or an American style. An artificial search for the Russian in architecture is conditioned by ideology and current politics. We say: Russian Classicism, Russian Avant-garde, Russian Baroque, Russian Modernism, thereby underlining not only the location of objects but also those traits that are identified as Russian. © 2023 Russian Academy of Architecture and Construction Sciences, Vostoksibacademcenter. All rights reserved

About mental and real axes

Axis is a term for many things: the axis of a cart, the axis of rotation, the axis of coordinates, the axis of symmetry... Originally, the axis was a part of a cart to which the wheels are attached. In a cart, it is visible and material, but more often the axis is understood as an imaginary straight line, which gives an idea of the peculiarities of the formation of the object and the ways of its ordering. It is naive to think that the order of forming-up of an architectural object is subject only to the architect’s own will, that architects draw the axis as they wish, especially when designing iconic buildings related to religion or power. Drawing the axes in architecture and urban planning follows the symbolic scheme of the currently dominant picture of the world. © 2022 Russian Academy of Architecture and Construction Sciences, Vostoksibacademcenter. All rights reserved

Disturber of the peace: Touches to the portrait of A. G. Rappaport

Alexander Herbertovich Rappaport is a philosopher, architect, art historian, author of many articles and books on the theory of architecture and art history, author of the unique blog “Tower and Maze”, where he regularly publishes his reflections. A huge influence on Rappaport’s formation was his work in the Moscow Methodological Circle of Georgy Petrovich Shchedrovitsky (MMC). In 1979 he left the MMC and since the early 1980s he has been engaged in phenomenology, a direction in philosophy, the founder of which was Edmund Husserl. Most of A. G. Rappaport’s articles and books are written within the framework of phenomenology, but the school of thought that Rappaport underwent at MMK had an undeniable influence on his work. Rappaport’s works merge Shchedrovitsky’s methodology, phenomenology and poetry. © 2023 Russian Academy of Architecture and Construction Sciences, Vostoksibacademcenter. All rights reserved

The crisis of a detail as a detail of the crisis

The birth of a new post-crisis architecture, human-scaled and reflecting deep philosophical and ideological foundations of the society, is possible if these foundations are not destroyed. The crises experienced by architecture in the 20th and early 21st centuries are related to the loss of ideological foundations of the society. The disappearance of symbolic details in architecture is a detail of the general crisis of culture. © 2023 Russian Academy of Architecture and Construction Sciences, Vostoksibacademcenter. All rights reserved

О глокализации естественной и искусственной

Glocalization is a point where globalization enters communities or phenomena of different styles, cultures and traditions, including the phenomena of fine arts and architecture. Artificial glocalization is a search and application of specific forms-signs, and creation of a set of characteristics symbolizing the local tradition. Natural glocalization occurs when the national culture is on the rise and is ready to accept any innovations without loss of identity, when it is not forms-signs that work, but forms-images, which are identified as national. © 2021 Russian Academy of Architecture and Construction Sciences, Vostoksibacademcenter. All rights reserved

Thus said Hippocrates

The traditional consideration of architectural history as a linear process, where one style successively replaces another, still dominates, but does not explain many phenomena. V.S. Goryunov substantiated a fundamentally different, non-linear model of the historical process in architecture on the basis of architecture of the 19th - early 20th centuries. V. S. Goryunov and M. P. Tubli proposed a stylistic polyphony of architecture with the introduction of the concepts of “Art Nouveau period” and “anti-eclectic movement”. In October 2021, a collection of articles by V. S. Goryunov entitled “Theoretical Problems of the History of Architecture” was published. The articles in this collection represent the main theoretical ideas of the scientist. © 2022 Russian Academy of Architecture and Construction Sciences, Vostoksibacademcenter. All rights reserved

There is a Prussian spirit here, but it smells of Russia...

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