For the topic of this issue we have chosen the environment's component that remains after the grand architecture – the ground between buildings and smaller forms that fill it. It is painful that this subject turns out to be of little significance for our urbanists. The residual principle of treatment of land reclamation culture imparts disorder, hasty temporariness to our cities, as if we are not residents here. The topic's urgency has to be proven by other's experience.
Huge urban agglomerations of the world become bigger and more numerous. In 2000 there were 16 giant cities with population more than 10 million people, and by 2015 their number will have grown up to 21. However the biggest share of the global urban population increase falls on relatively small places with population from 500,000 to 5 million people. Within 2000-2015 the tendencies will be similar.
Global urbanization engrosses more and more countries and regions. Mankind keeps on growing irregularly – population increase is concentrated in cities.
It is obvious why human...
Many critics consider Richard Serra the leading sculptor of the 20th century. He is famous not only for inventing something new in sculpture (abstract sculpture compositions existed before him, having been opened by constructivist vanguard of the beginning of the 20th century). Material selections by Vladimir Tatlin and sculptures by Osip Tsadkin, as well as compositions by Henry Moor appeared before Serra. Serra is famous for transferring his works' accent from the works as they are, which could be installed in any place, to their environment. That is he saw in the sculpture a key to...
Environment is assumed as both object-space surroundings in their sensibly given components, and surroundings of a human being in particularly social sense revealed in observed signs of distribution of roles and positions. When focusing on the first interpretation we face mostly the «still life» vision of the city. Here the city is equated to a landscape, for example in English terminology the word 'townscape' has this very fixed meaning. In the traditional art history estimation the townscape is easily analyzed both as a whole and elementarily. When focusing on the second interpretation...