In January 2021, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud launched The Line city project. Even for the Saudis’ fantastical ambitions, the project looks amazing: a city stretched along a straight line for 170 kilometers across the sandy desert from the Red Sea coast to the capital of the mountainous Tabuk province. The city will have three floors: a pedestrian zone on the surface, service infrastructure on the underground floor, and on the floor below there will be highspeed railways.
It seems ironic that the ideas of a linear city, which were actively developed in the USSR,...
The news announces the winners of the Daylight Award 2022 and the opening of the Great Green Wall Student Competition and the 5th cycle of the Golden Cubes Awards.
The history of Baikalsk and the BPPM became the background of the traditional all-Russian festival ArchBukhta organized by the Club of Young Architects (Irkutsk). The organizers associated the theme of the festival, Obvilion, with its problematical character, direct connotations with the fate of the Mill and existential questions. The article describes the art objects created by the participating teams.
The article tells about the history of the ARCHIGESH Skiing Festival and its special features for this year. The information is given about the participants, the winners of the festival, the intellectual program and the informal events. The authors paid attention to the increasing presence of the professional component at the festival.
This section covers the main architectural events and competitions held in Moscow, Norilsk, Krasnoyarsk and Irkutsk during the first 4 months of 2022.
The article considers the concept of linearity in relation to objects of various scales, from a single city to the Eurasian macroregion. It is shown that the traditional understanding of linearity in the modern information society requires a more extended understanding. Based on the material on the history of the Great Silk Road, an assumption was made about a high level of trust as a necessary condition for linearity.
Modern urbanization process is determined by many factors, among which the transport revolution plays the most important role, changing the mental geography of continents, the metric of space and time. The prospects of development of cities and intercity communications based on advanced information and transport technologies define a new urban reality, in which the key category of urban civilization development is continuity.
A complete embodiment of the line in the world of architectural or near-architectural forms is undoubtedly the road, the binding thread. The essay considers roads as an ideal type, especially the roads outside settlements, which form, as the author seeks to show, a dialectical pair with cities. Other significant pairs are the landscape/road; place/”non-place”; interior/exterior, which are also the subject of the given reflections.
The article deals with the “nature" of development, the paradigm of which, unlike the growth, is non-linear. However, the predominant projection of ideas of development (expansion), including projections on a map, is still the line in its various drawings. Thinking in lines is not harmless: it can reduce a significant content of development ideas; at the level of plans (which are always linear), it can transfer the intension of development into a sequence of emasculated actions. The article emphasizes a special type of spatial consciousness and discourse, which generates the ideas of...
The article analyzes the transformation processes in the transport system of the Russian Empire as a result of Catherine II’s legislative activity. The empress considered roads not only as means of transportation but also as means of communication (including information communication) linking the whole state. The new road system was to reflect the hierarchy of state power location: capitals – principal towns of provinces – principal towns of districts – gentry estates and rural settlements. Of particular interest are technical innovations in road construction, river channels, bridges and...
Linear cities have been created for dozens of centuries, but the theoretical un-derstanding of this phenomenon mainly occurred in the first decades of the twentieth century. Soviet architect N. Milyutin not only established a coherent scientific rationale for the linear city, but also embodied his ideas in the structures of several cities. In the same period Le Corbusier implemented his urban projects in Algeria and Brazil, and after him many architects around the world have turned to the concept of the linear city.
We are publishing a selection of materials discussing the...
The article is devoted to the features and origins of Nikolay Milyutin’s urban planning theory. Written long before the completion of his formal education, his book “Socialist city” became extremely popular among the planners and architects of the 20th century, but the real extent of his contribution to the practice of building new cities, as well as the impact on subsequent developments have not yet been fully measured. Milyutin himself was quite familiar with the urban planning thought of his time thanks not only to his communication with Le Corbusier, but also to his books, primarily...
In the historical perspective, Irkutsk has always been a city with high linearity. In the 1960s, a group of young architects made active attempts to give Irkutsk a high degree of linearity. Their projects echo the work of the Moscow NER group, the Archigram group, and Japanese metabolists. The most striking project to improve the linearity of Irkutsk was the “Baikal Ray” by V. Voronezhsky. In recent years, there has been an increase in interest in the projects of linear cities and regions created by the sixtiers. The article considers the conditions under which the restructuring of...
The article presents some ideas of the concept for transformation of the Baikal Pulp and Paper Mill (BPPM) industrial site, a new vision of the city, as well as approaches for overcoming the lack of connectivity of separate parts of the city. The article justifies the increase in population and tourist flow, and formulates proposals for functional zoning and location of the first phase of construction.
The article is the third in the series of studies on underground urbanistics. It describes the concept of underground space development in the historic center of Irkutsk on the basis of the analysis made within the framework of master’s thesis on the topic. Proposals on underground urbanistics in the territory of “Irkutsk Quarters” are thoroughly developed.
As an expert at the competition for the development of an architectural and planning renovation concept for the city of Norilsk up to 2035, the ADM design studio was invited by the Norilsk Development Agency to work as an expert in the elaboration of the city’s development programmes. The work enabled the team to understand the range of problems and the territorial and natural-climatic uniqueness of the place. After the announcement of the competition, ADM and Grazhdanproekt Institute decided to participate themselves, as they had practical experience in designing for the North. The...
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...
Thousands of years ago, a system of routes was taking shape across the Eurasian continent, transporting people, goods, ideas and technology from east to west and from west to east. The armies of Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan passed along those routes; caravans of merchants carried silk, porcelain, spices and wisdom books. Today the concept of the Great Silk Road is not just coming to life, but is becoming one of the largescale ideas for the development of dozens of states, up to the global level. The New Silk Road will be implemented simultaneously along many parallel paths. The...
The article considers the prospects of creating the New Silk Road as the main element of the global interstate initiative “One Belt, One Road”, which involves the implementation of real economic projects that will last for decades. This initiative is also considered as a predominantly infrastructural concept (construction of railways and roads, transport and logistics centers, bridges, pipelines, etc.). Its implementation involves infrastructural development at the level of interstate contacts and the implementation of global projects with the participation of state-owned companies....
The paper covers the work of international forums held by the Architectural Institute of Japan since 2009, which were dedicated to expert discussion and conceptual design of historic cities in the Silk Road system. The article considers the results of the forum, which was first held in Russia (Samara and Moscow) with a parallel workshop for students of domestic and foreign universities. The purpose of the forum is to preserve a unique architectural heritage; to evaluate lessons of the historical environment; to work out the concepts for regeneration and effective development of...
Construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway (Transsib) was one of the greatest events in the history of development of the Russian Empire, the USSR and the whole continent. Using the terminology of the NER, we can call the main line a riverbed or a tree trunk, through which flows the feeding sap. With the advent of the Transsib the cities and the whole regions of the empire got an impulse for development and unification. The history of the Transsib tells us how one large-scale project dramatically increased the linearity of the whole vast country.The rapid pace of development of...
The article reveals pages of creative biography of the Russian architect, civil engineer, building technician, professor of architecture M. Yu. Arnold, which were previously unknown to the historical and architectural science. The article provides brief historical information on the main stages and results of his professional and scientific-pedagogical activities in the central part of the country. On the basis of archival data and field study materials obtained by the author in 2021 during his scientific expedition to the cities of the Far East, Transbaikalia and Yakutia, the full...
The article is dedicated to the work of the Russian engineer in China, Yuliy Petrovich Zhdanov. The article describes the objects in which consular offices were located, namely: the Dutch consulate in the Chistyakov mansion, the Japanese consulate in the building of the Harbin branch of the South Manchurian Railway, as well as the Portuguese consulate in the Skidelsky mansion and the residence of the Consul General of Japan, which, according to some data, belonged to his authorship. An analysis of the space planning and stylistic features of these buildings is presented. A short excursus...
The article is devoted to the creative activity of a graduate of the St. Petersburg Institute of Civil Engineers, B. M. Tustanovsky, who worked in Transbaikalia at the beginning of the 20th century. Brief biographical data concerning the main stages of his professional activity in the Eastern outskirts of the Russian Empire are given. The article considers the surviving projects and buildings of B. M. Tustanovsky identified by the author basing on the materials of the State Archive of the Trans-Baikal Territory and during the field study of architectural monuments of the Trans-Baikal...
The article is devoted to the analysis of the development of the architecture of the Central Bank of Manchukuo in 1932–1945. The prerequisites for the development of the architecture of banking institutions in the region are considered. The key influence of the Japanese architectural school, which manifested itself to the greatest extent in the 1930s after the formation of Manchukuo, is revealed. The building of the head office of the Central Bank in Changchun, which incorporated the most advanced developments and approaches to the construction of such facilities, is described in detail....
The article is devoted to three directions of oriental architecture – cult, palace and park. Its main part concerns the architecture of the Budapest synagogues. As an example of Russian orientalism, the phenomenon of Black Sea palaces of the highest St. Petersburg aristocracy is given. The Hungarian masterpiece of park oriental architecture, the elephant house in the zoo of Budapest, is analyzed. It is concluded that Orientalism had influence on the formation of national styles and fostered the development of Art Nouveau, Art Deco and Modernism.
In Asia Minor (modern Turkey), the authors found an example of a typical and well-studied polis of Kyaneai, province of Lycia. The article reveals the basic principles of the formation of this polis on the basis of the central location of the main city asty surrounded by district cities – demoses with a balanced development of its entire territory – chora. An analysis of various types of small settlements is provided, the road structure of this polis and its external relations is revealed, the importance of distances and accessibility between each of its elements and the central city as...
The article analyses different aspects and paradoxes of the contemporary theory of architecture. The ideas of physics, philosophy, poetry and language theory have been translated into the language of architectural forms. The absence of architectural theory is illustrated by the avant-garde architectural practices. The article studies the historical movement, epochs in the interaction of social reality and architectural theory confirming the syncretism of architectural practice and theory.
The postulation of the new principles of being (decentration, plurality, chaoticness, rhizomaticity) by the philosophers -postmodernists reflected the nonlinear nature of the development of the social system, one of the projections of which was the formation of a new direction of architecture. Analysis of the works of the theorists of postmodernism revealed the influence of the new worldview paradigm on the transformation of architecture as a response to social challenges of our time. The explication of the principles of postmodernism in architecture expressed itself in the...
This article is devoted to the problem of architecture’s relative independence from its theory. From the 18th to the 20th century, architects followed scientists in inventing theories using numbers, formulas and figures. They tried to comprehend architecture with the help of space and time categories, applying biological and linguistic theories to architecture. The author states that the phenomenon of architectural theory can only be explained from the postulate of its independence as a form of human culture.