The theme of tradition in modern architecture, as a rule, is reduced to a question of style, moreover, in the minds of almost the majority - the style of "Luzhkovsky". But even impeccable historical stylizations are perceived today as empty shells, dead copies, while their prototypes were filled with living meaning. Even today they continue to talk about something, moreover, the older the monument, the more important its silent monologue seems.
The fundamental irreducibility of the phenomenon of tradition to the question of style became the leitmotif of the scientific-practical conference "Tradition and counter-tradition in the architecture and visual arts of the Newest time" held in St. Petersburg.
Background
But first about the project itself. “MONUMENTALITÀ & MODERNITÀ” translated from Italian means “monumentality and modernity”. The project arose spontaneously in 2010, under the strong impression of the "Mussolinian" architecture seen in Rome. In addition to me, its origins were the architect Rafael Dayanov, the Italian philologist-Russianist Stefano Maria Kapilupi and the art critic Ivan Chechot, who came up with our beautiful motto.
The result of joint efforts was the conference "Architecture of Russia, Germany and Italy of the" totalitarian "period", which turned out with a distinct "Italian flavor". But even then it became clear to us that it was pointless to stay within the zones of the main dictatorial regimes - the topic of interwar and post-war neoclassicism is much broader.
Therefore, the next conference of the project was devoted to the "totalitarian" period as a whole ("Problems of perception, interpretation and preservation of the architectural and artistic heritage of the" totalitarian "period, 2011). However, this framework turned out to be close: I wanted to make not only a horizontal, but also a vertical cut, trace the genesis, evaluate further transformations.
In the 2013 conference, not only geographical, but also chronological boundaries were expanded: it was called "The Classical Tradition in Architecture and Fine Arts of the Newest Time."
It must be said that despite the practical absence of a budget, our conferences each time attracted about 30 speakers from Russia, the CIS, Italy, the USA, Japan, Lithuania, not to mention absentee participants. Most of the guests traditionally come from Moscow. Since then, the co-organizers of our events have alternately become the St. Petersburg State University (Smolny Institute), the Russian Christian Academy for the Humanities, the European University in St. Petersburg, and the St. Petersburg State University of Architecture and Civil Engineering. And most importantly, we managed to create a positively charged field of rich and unconstrained professional communication, where theorists and practitioners exchanged experience in one classroom.
Finally, the topic of the last conference was the phenomenon of tradition as such, since the term "classical" is strongly associated with columns and porticoes, while tradition, as you know, is also orderless.
Thus, moving from the particular to the general, we came to the question of the very essence of tradition, and the main task was to transfer the theme from the category of style to the category of meaning.
So, the 2015 conference was named "Tradition and Counter-Tradition in the Architecture and Fine Arts of the Newest Time". The permanent organizers - the Kapitel magazine in my person and the Council for Cultural and Historical Heritage of the Union of Architects of St. Petersburg in the person of Rafael Dayanov - were joined by the Scientific Research Institute of Theory and History of Architecture and Urban Planning, which was represented by scientific secretary Diana Keipen, who had specially arrived from Moscow -Warditz.
Tradition and counter-tradition
The theme of tradition in modern times is as relevant as it is inexhaustible. Today I have a feeling of the question posed, which has begun to acquire, albeit vague, but still visible outlines. And they began to touch this lump from different sides: what is tradition in the original philosophical sense? How was it understood and understood in the context of modernity? As a stylistics or as a fundamental orientation towards the timeless, the eternal? What manifestations of tradition in the twentieth century need to be reassessed? Which ones do we see today, which ones do we consider the most interesting and meaningful?
For me, the fundamental antagonism of two superstyles - tradition and modernism - is a matter of fundamental ethical and aesthetic guidelines. The culture of the tradition was focused on the idea of the Absolute, expressed by the concepts of truth, goodness and beauty. In the culture of tradition, ethics and aesthetics strove for identity.
As the idea of the Absolute, which began in modern times, was blurring, the paths of ethics and aesthetics diverged further and further, until the traditional ideas of beauty turned into a dead shell, a peeling mask filled with many secular, rational meanings. All these new meanings lay in the material plane of linear progress, the sacred vertical disappeared. There has been a transition from the sacred, qualitative world to the pragmatic, quantitative world. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the new paradigm of consciousness and the industrial mode of production blew up the forms that had become alien from the inside - the avant-garde emerged as the art of negation.
In the second half of the twentieth century, the picture became more complicated: rejecting the idea of the Absolute as an invisible tuning fork and even an avant-garde anti-orientation towards it as a starting point, culture exists in a formless field of subjectivity, where everyone can choose their own personal coordinate system. The very principle of consistency is questioned, the very notion of structuralness, the very possibility of the existence of a unique unifying center (poststructuralism in philosophy) is criticized. In architecture, this found expression in postmodernism, deconstructivism, nonlinearity.
To put it mildly, not all colleagues accept my point of view. The closest to me seemed the position of our correspondence participant G. A. Ptichnikova (Moscow), speaking about the value essence of tradition, about its vertical core, "bombarded" by "horizontal" innovations.
I. A. Bondarenko. However, he rejects the idea of counter-tradition: the transition from an essential orientation to an unattainable ideal to the vulgar utopian idea of calculating and embodying it here and now he calls the absolutization of tradition (from my point of view, this is the absolutization of certain formal manifestations of tradition to the detriment of its essence, and in the period of modernism and even a tradition inside out, that is, exactly a counter-tradition). In addition, Igor Andreevich looks with optimism at modern architectural and philosophical relativism, seeing in it a certain guarantor of no return to the inappropriate absolutization of the relative. It seems to me that such a danger can in no way justify oblivion of the truly Absolute.
A significant number of researchers do not see any antagonism between tradition and modernity, believing that architecture is only “bad” and “good”, “author's” and “imitative”, that the imaginary contradiction between classics and modernism is an indissoluble dialectical unity. I have come across the opinion that Le Corbusier is a direct successor to the ideas of the ancient classics. At our current conference, V. K. Linov, in continuation of the theses of 2013, singled out the fundamental, pivotal features inherent in "good" architecture of any era.
The report of I. S. Hare, focused on the functional and practical ("benefit - strength"), the basic manifestations of architecture of all times. Personally, I was sorry that Vitruvian "beauty", which the author completely attributed to the private sphere of taste, was originally removed from this analysis, the main secret and elusive intrigue of the tradition. It is also a pity that, even trying to comprehend global architectural processes, researchers often ignore parallel phenomena in philosophy - again, in spite of Vitruvius …
I have long had the feeling that everything new in modern architecture that has a constructive meaning is a well-forgotten old, from time immemorial inherent in traditional architecture. It became new only in the context of modernism. Now new names are being invented for these fragments of the lost essence, new directions are being derived from them.
- Phenomenological architecture as an attempt to get away from the dictate of abstract rationality to the detriment of sensory experience and subjective experience of space.
- Institutional architecture as a search for basic, non-style foundations of various traditions.
- The genre of metautopia in architecture as a manifestation of a super-idea, “metaphysics of architecture” is an echo of the well-forgotten Platonic eidos.
- Organic architecture in its old and new varieties as a utopian attempt by man to return to the bosom of nature that he is destroying.
- New urbanism, polycentrism as a desire to rely on pre-modern urban planning principles.
- Finally, the classical order and other formal and stylistic features of the tradition …
The list goes on.
All these scattered, fragmentary meanings today are opposed to each other, whereas initially they were in a living, dialectical unity, naturally born, on the one hand, from basic, integral ideas about the world as a sacred hierarchical space, and on the other, from local tasks, conditions and methods of production. In other words, traditional architecture in its modern language expressed timeless values. Incredibly diverse, it is united by a genetic relationship.
Modern appeals to tradition, as a rule, demonstrate the opposite approach: in them, various (as a rule, split, particular) modern meanings are expressed using elements of the traditional language.
It seems that the search for a full-fledged alternative to modernism is a question of the meaning of tradition, and not of one or another of its forms, a question of value orientation, a question of returning to an absolute coordinate system.
Theory and practice
This year the circle of active practitioners who took part in our conference has become even wider. In the mutual communication of art historians, designers, historians of architecture, as well as representatives of related arts (albeit still rare), stable stereotypes are destroyed, ideas about art critics as dry, meticulous snobs who have no idea about the real process of design and construction, and about architects as about self-righteous and narrow-minded art businessmen who are only interested in the opinion of customers.
In addition to attempts to comprehend the fundamental processes in architecture, many of the conference reports were devoted to specific manifestations of tradition in the architecture of modern times, from the invariable "totalitarian" period to the present day.
Pre-war architecture of Leningrad (A. E. Belonozhkin, St. Petersburg), London (P. Kuznetsov, St. Petersburg), Lithuania (M. Ptashek, Vilnius), urban planning of Tver (A. A. Smirnova, Tver), points of contact between the avant-garde and traditions in urban planning Moscow and Petrograd-Leningrad (Yu. Starostenko, Moscow), the genesis of Soviet art deco (A. D. Barkhin, Moscow), the preservation and adaptation of monuments (R. M. Dayanov, St. Petersburg, A. and N. Chadovichi, Moscow) - these and other "historical" themes smoothly passed into the problems of today. The issues of introducing new architecture into the historical center of our city were discussed in the reports of A. L. Punina, M. N. Mikishatyeva, partly V. K. Linov, as well as M. A. Mamoshin, who shared his own experience of working in the historical center.
Moscow speakers N. A. Rochegova (with co-author E. V. Barchugova) and A. V. Gusev.
Finally, examples of the formation of a new habitat based on tradition were demonstrated from his own practice by the Muscovite M. A. Belov and St. Petersburg resident M. B. Atayants. At the same time, while Mikhail Belov's village near Moscow is clearly designed for the “cream of society” and is still empty, the “City of Embankments” for economy class in Khimki by Maxim Atayants is filled with life and is an extremely human-friendly environment.
Babylonian confusion
The pleasure of interacting with colleagues and the general professional satisfaction of the highlight did not prevent, however, from making an important critical observation. Its essence is not new, but it is still relevant, namely: as it deepens in particular, science is rapidly losing the whole.
At the beginning of the 20th century, traditionalist philosophers N. Berdyaev and Rene Guénon were already talking about the crisis of a fragmented, essentially positivist, mechanical-quantitative science. Even earlier, Metropolitan Filaret (Drozdov), a prominent theologian and scholar-philologist. In the 1930s, the phenomenologist Husserl called for a return on a new level to a pre-scientific, syncretic view of the world. And this unifying way of thinking "must choose the naive manner of speech inherent in life and at the same time use it in proportion to how it is required for the evidence of evidence."
Today, in my opinion, this "naivety of speech", which clearly expresses clear thoughts, is sorely lacking in architectural science, which is replete with new terms, but often suffers from blurred meaning.
As a result, delving deeper into the texts of the reports and getting to the bottom of the essence, one wonders how much people speak in different languages at times about the same things. Or, on the contrary, they put completely different meanings into the same terms. As a result, the experience and efforts of the best specialists are not only not consolidated, but often remain completely closed to colleagues.
I cannot say that the conference managed to completely overcome these linguistic and semantic barriers, but the very possibility of a live dialogue seems important. Therefore, one of the most important tasks of the project, we, the organizers, consider the search for a conference format that is maximally aimed at active listening and discussion.
In any case, the three-day intensive exchange of views became unusually interesting, it was nice to hear the words of gratitude from colleagues and wishes for further communication. S. P. Shmakov wished that the speakers would devote more time to contemporary St. Petersburg architecture "with the transition to personalities", this will bring together the representatives of a single, but split into separate parts of the profession even closer.
Colleague comments
S. P. Shmakov, Honored Architect of the Russian Federation, Corresponding Member of the IAAME:
“Regarding the topic of the last conference on“tradition and counter-tradition”, I can confirm that the topic is relevant at all times, as it affects a huge layer of creativity, painfully deciding the issue of the relationship between traditions and innovation in art in general and in architecture in particular. In my opinion, these two concepts are two sides of the same coin, or yin and yang from Eastern wisdom. This is a dialectical unity, where one concept flows smoothly into another and vice versa. Innovation, which at first denied the tradition of historicism, soon becomes a tradition itself. However, after spending a long period in his clothes, he then strives back into the bosom of historicism, which can be qualified as a new and bold innovation. Today you can find such examples when, tired of the dominance of glass architecture, you suddenly see an appeal to the classics, which you just want to call a new innovation.
Now I will clarify my idea on the possible form of such a conference. So that practicing architects and art critics do not exist in parallel worlds, one could imagine their face-to-face collision, when an art critic-critic joins the presenting architect-practitioner as an opponent and they try to give birth to truth in a friendly dispute. Even if the delivery fails, it will still be beneficial to the audience. There could be many such pairs, and the participants-spectators of these battles could, by raising their hands (why not?), Take the position of one or the other."
M. A. Mamoshin, architect, vice-president of St. Petersburg CA, professor of IAA, academician of MAAM, corresponding member of RAASN, head of LLC "Architectural workshop Mamoshin":
“The past conference dedicated to the topic“traditions - countertraditions in the architecture of the Newest time”attracted not only professional art critics, but also practicing architects to participate. For the first time, a symbiosis of practice and art history information has turned out in the context of this topic, which leads to the idea of the need to revive such practical (in the literal sense of the word!) Conferences. Bridging this barrier between practicing architects and architectural theorists is not a new idea. In the 30-50s, the main task at the Academy of Architecture was to combine the theory and practice of the current moment. It was the flowering of theory and practice in their unity. These two essential things complemented each other. Unfortunately, in the revived Academy (RAASN), we see that the block of art historians (theory) and practicing architects is divided. Isolation occurs when theorists are absorbed in internal problems, and practitioners do not analyze the current moment. I believe that further movement towards the convergence of theory and practice is one of the main tasks. I would like to express my gratitude to the organizers of the conference who made a step along this path."
D. V. Capeen-Varditz, Ph. D. in art history, scientific secretary of NIITIAG:
“The past fourth conference within the framework of the MONUMENTALITÀ & MODERNITÀ project left an impression of unusually busy days. A dense program of more than 30 reports right during the meetings was supplemented by unscheduled detailed speeches on the topic, and the discussion started during the discussion of the reports smoothly turned into informal lively communication between participants and listeners during breaks and after the sessions. It is obvious that not only the theme of the conference declared by the organizers on the problem of the genesis and correlation of tradition and counter-tradition, but also the very format of its organization and conduct attracted many different participants and listeners: university professors (Zavarikhin, Punin, Whitens, Lisovsky), practical architects (Atayants, Belov, Mamoshin, Linov, etc.), researchers (Mikishatyev, Konysheva, Guseva, etc.), restorers (Dayanov, Ignatiev, Zayats), graduate students of architecture and art universities. The ease with which people from the same workshop, but of different views, occupations, ages found a common language, undoubtedly became the merit of the organizer and host of the conference, the editor-in-chief of the Kapitel magazine, I. O. Bembel. Having brought together interesting and interested participants and managed to create a very relaxed atmosphere, she and her colleagues who chaired the meetings invariably guided the general discussion in a professional and diplomatic way. Thanks to this, the most burning topics (new construction in historical cities, problems of restoration of monuments) were able to be discussed taking into account all points of view, which in ordinary professional life have little chance or desire to be mutually heard. Perhaps the conference could be compared to an architectural salon, where anyone can speak and anyone can discover something new. And this is the most important quality of the conference and the main point of its attraction.
The creation of a permanent platform for conducting professional discussion, the idea of overcoming the intra-workshop disunity between theorists and practitioners, historians and innovators for a comprehensive discussion of architecture problems in the broad context of culture, society, politics and economics is a huge achievement. The need for such a discussion is obvious even from the number of ideas and proposals for "improving" the genre and format of the conference, which the participants put forward at the last round table. But even if the scale and format of the conference and the enthusiasm of its organizers and participants are preserved, a wonderful future awaits it."
M. N. Mikishatyev, historian of architecture, senior researcher at NIITIAG:
“Unfortunately, we managed to listen to and watch not all the messages, but the general tone of the speeches, which to some extent was set by the author of these lines, is a depressing state, if not the death of modern architecture. What we see on the streets of our city is no longer works of architecture, but products of a certain design, and not even designed for a long life. The famous theorist A. G. Rappaport, just like us, notes "the gradual convergence of architecture and design", while pointing out the insurmountable divergence of these forms of creating an artificial habitat, "because design is fundamentally focused on mobile structures, and architecture on stable", and moreover - design by by its very nature it presupposes "the planned moral aging of things and their elimination, and architecture has inherited an interest, if not for eternity, then for a long time." However, A. G. Rappaport does not lose hope. In his article “Large-scale reduction”, he writes: “However, it is possible that a general democratic reaction and a new intelligentsia will emerge, which will take responsibility for correcting these trends, and architecture will be in demand by the new democratic elite as a profession capable of returning the world to its organic life ".
The last day of the conference, which featured speeches by practicing architects Mikhail Belov and Maxim Atayants, showed that such a turn of events is not just a hope and a dream, but a real process that is unfolding in modern domestic architecture. M. Atayants spoke about one of the satellite cities he created in the Moscow region (see Capital No. 1 for 2014), where the images of St. Petersburg as New Amsterdam are concentrated in a small space. The breath of Stockholm and Copenhagen is also quite palpable here. How, perhaps, comforting to its real inhabitants, after returning from service from the crazy capital, defiled by all these plazas and high-techs, passing the Moscow orbital and roadways, to find yourself in your nest, with granite embankments reflected in the canals, arched bridges and lanterns, with beautiful and various brick houses, in its cozy and not too expensive apartment … But a dream, even a fulfilled one, leaves a fraction of the fear brought up by Dostoevsky's fantasies houses and smoke - into the high sky near Moscow?.."
R. M. Dayanov, co-organizer of the MONUMENTALITÀ & MODERNITÀ project, honorary architect of the Russian Federation, head of the Liteinaya chast-91 design bureau, chairman of the Council for Cultural and Historical Heritage of St. Petersburg SA:
“The fourth conference within the framework of the MONUMENTALITÀ & MODERNITÀ project allowed us to see the path we have traveled over these four years.
When we started this project, it was assumed that it would be about the preservation and study of objects and cultural phenomena of a certain period, limited to 1930-1950 years. But, as in any delicious food, the appetite for the fourth course was playing up! And suddenly the practitioners joined the scientific community. There is a hope that they will continue to be actively introduced into this process in order to develop, together with art historians and architecture historians, a view not only of what happened 70-80 years ago, but also of yesterday's, today's and tomorrow's phenomena.
Look, the foundations of tomorrow's architecture have already been laid, but what will grow on them? Will we be able to live with dignity in this - or are these "wolf pits", bombs, slums? And won't the next 70 years have to uproot what has been created?
How imperceptibly we moved from the problem of conservation to the question of creation … Maybe this is the meaning of a scientific-practical conference, and not just a scientific one. Science has lagged too far behind, entangled in the jungle of the neo-Renaissance. It's so convenient and safe not to touch today's names. Or maybe it is worth looking for the origins of future processes in modern phenomena - to give food to descendants?
The past conference convinced us: the practitioners have something to share."
Summing up, I would like to wish the project to receive more weighty, comprehensive and systemic support from the architectural department.
