The Latin expression genius loci has been most often applied to landscape, and we pay tribute to it already on the cover. But the same expression applies to a person who jealously preserves the unique atmosphere of a place. We state that a human being can spiritualise a place, i.e. become its genius. In 1817, five of Pushkin’s lyceum mates put a stone in the Tsarskoye Selo park with the inscription “To G.L. – genius of place”. More than two hundred years later, it seems appropriate for us, who recognise the City as a living organism with a soul, to talk about the genius of place. At the...
Siberian architects demonstrate sustainable development in all areas of their work: architecture, urban planning, urbanism, caring for heritage, and education. Not everything goes according to plan, some obstacles have to be overcome, but such is our profession and such is the world.Architects are consistent and stable in their public and competitive activities. Every year, under the auspices of the Union of Architects of Russia, several large festivals take place in Siberia. Each of them has its distinct identity: educational Winter University, skiing Archigesh, youth Archbukhta....
On 15 June at 10:30, a discussion club of Zodchestvo in Siberia-Project Baikal (ZVS-PB) was held in the Irkutsk House of the Architect. It was dedicated to the theme of the festival: SIBIRIAN CODE. The round table gathered representatives from Irkutsk, Bratsk, Krasnoyarsk, Kemerovo, Novokuznetsk, Barnaul, Tomsk, Novosibirsk and Nizhny Novgorod. Elena Grigorieva, vice-president of the Union of Architects of Russia for the Siberian Federal District, architect and publisher was the moderator.
The news section announces this year’s winners of the UIA Triennial Prizes, the UIA Friendly and Inclusive Spaces Awards, the Next Generation of Stroke Rehabilitation Centres international student ideas competition and the DNA Paris Design Awards. It also provides information on the designation of Barcelona as the World Capital of Architecture for 2026.
The competition for a hotel in Solnechny microdistrict is considered in the context of the competitions held in Irkutsk since the mid-2010s. Spatial and organisational features of the competition and the teams are characterised. The participation of Irkutsk architects in the competition is highlighted.
On May 27, 2023, the jubilee V Tournament of Architectural Graphics “Line of Thought”, established by the Iakov Chernikhov International Foundation in 2018, was held within the framework of the XXVIII International Exhibition of Architecture and Design “ARCH MOSCOW”. The aim of the Tournament is to support the art of hand-made graphics. The prize, the Silver Stylus, was unexpectedly awarded to Marianna Antonova, a beginning architect from St. Petersburg. Architect Andrey Chernikhov, the author of the idea and the President of the Iakov Chernikhov International Foundation, will tell us...
From 14-17 June the XXIII interregional architectural festival “Zodchestvo in Siberia 2023” took place in Irkutsk. The article presents the chronicle of “Zodchestvo in Siberia 2023”, the geography of participants, the list of speakers, the stars of Russian architecture, invited to give master-classes, as well as the themes of excursions.
The Catalogue presents the winners and the participants of the 23rd Interregional Festival “Zodchestvo in Siberia 2023”.
The article considers the concepts of Genius Loci and Zeitgeist and shows the contradictions between these two aspects and their influence on the development of architecture. It is concluded that the predominance of the Genius of Place forms a gravitation towards sedentarisation and diversity of local architectural forms. The predominance of the Spirit of the Time stimulates the development of uniform international architectural styles that ignore the peculiarities of landscape and scenery. During the twentieth century, the development of architecture was mainly shaped by the Spirit of...
The ‘place’ category in architectural theory is in opposition to the ‘space’ category, but ‘place’ is also understood as ‘space’. It is no coincidence that topology is called the analysis of place. Geometry and topology have had a strong effect not only on physics, crystallography and molecular chemistry, but also on architecture and other humanities, in particular on the psychology of visual perception. “Topophilia” by Yi-Fu Tuan is a bridge that creates the possibility of moving from mathematics and topology to the humanities. However, the use of the concepts of ‘place’ and...
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...
The article is a reflection of a bright event of the author’s life experience. It can be said that the individual trajectory of thinking and activity consists of such events, provided, of course, their full and sincere reflection and evaluation. An attempt of such an evaluation is presented in this article. The article affirms that nowadays Genius loci is no more a timid animal living under the wet stones of Nature. It has had to settle in the human Houses and to become them; it looks at us from the windows and is bewildered by our unsettledness.
The main goal of the article is to study the transformation of the style of banking and consular institutions in Manchuria in comparison with its Japanese counterparts. The first part of the work provides an introduction and indicates the relevance of the topic. The author of the architectural style of tatsuno is the architect Kingo Tatsuno. The article carries out an analysis of his creative path and identifies his main buildings, which later formed into a separate style. The continuity of tatsuno to the German Renaissance is shown, the main elements of the style are revealed. Most of...
The article analyses the choice of objects for consular offices according to five periods of time. The main problems that arose during the appearance of the first consular institutions are shown. The political and economic patterns of development of consular institutions are determined. The analysis of the collected materials made it possible to identify three types of consular objects. This gave an opportunity to form a more complete picture of the consular facilities in Manchuria. The authors give a brief overview of the consular offices and architects who were involved in the design...
The development concept for the eastern part of the historical centre of Chita carried out by the team of the Siberian Laboratory of Urbanistics is based on the peculiarities of the border area (genius of place) and special rare toponymy of the name of Kastrinskaya Street (genius of time).
The article reveals the regularities of formation of the existing town-planning fragments and inclusion of those under design in the system of the historical centre of Irkutsk. The article considers the main evolutionary stages of the development of the historical centre of Irkutsk and the regularities of the formation of the fragments of the development during those historical periods. The authors’ methodology of revealing the problems of fragmentation is developed on the basis of the analysis of conflict neighbouring of buildings. The authors define the principles of formation of the...
The article presents one of the virtual layers of modern architecture of Yekaterinburg, the capital of the Middle Urals, which has been created by the author for two decades and offered to investors and city authorities for realization. The article touches the problem of stylistic and large-scale juxtaposition of modern and historical layers of the urban architecture in the context of intensive development of the urban structure.
University campuses are multifunctional complexes comprising academic, residential, cultural and leisure facilities and public spaces. They fully reflect modern trends in shaping the architectural environment of cities. It is in universities that distance and network learning technologies have been tested in recent years, which inevitably affects the concepts of ‘place’ and ‘time’ in their organisation. In this article, the ‘artificial’ architectural environment is understood as an environment which is created simultaneously under the influence of realistic requirements for the...
In ancient Greece, architects sought to ensure that the sound of the voice reached the viewer’s ears “distinctly and pleasantly”. To do this, they turned to the theory of musical resonances and created a multidisciplinary concept of architecture. The precedents of successful audience forms and the development of science helped to create architectural masterpieces with good acoustics. The birth of the science of architectural acoustics at the beginning of the 20th century gave hope for a good prediction of the sound quality of designed auditoriums. But by the middle of the 20th century,...
The article describes some objective characteristics of the formation of architecture in the capital of the emirate of Dubai. These characteristics do not coincide with commonly accepted views. The main factors, preconditions and trends of its rapid development from the present to the future are outlined. The article presents some proactive conceptual solutions for exclusive architectural designs in Dubai worked out by the author in the 2000s.
While the causes of climate changes remain poorly understood, their nature is undeniable. The shift in climate zone boundaries is accompanied by a rapid increase in the number and scale of extreme weather events, temperature and humidity variations. For many regions of Eurasia, climatic changes are manifested in the onset of desert and semi-desert (arid) climate zones. Extreme weather phenomena have a particularly threatening impact on urban life. For a variety of reasons, the urban environment is less resilient to weather disasters. The ways of increasing the resilience of urban...
The article gives the definitions of such concepts as vernacular city, vernacular urbanism and vernacular approach in the study of the origin and development of the historic city. It considers the problems arising in urban settlements as a result of unrestrained spontaneous growth. The impact of uncontrolled multiplication of development of urban peripheries affects the functioning of the whole urban organism. The problems of spontaneous horizontal growth of the city’s territory are considered on the example of Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan.
The space of the city and the space of the theater stage have a lot in common. Transformations of urban spaces have much more limitations than experiments with stage space. The article presents a comparative analysis of two avant-garde trends of the early twentieth century in the theater and, in parallel, in architecture. It is shown that Brecht’s epic theater and Bauhaus architecture were strongly influenced by Spengler’s pessimistic ideas. The Meyerhold Theater and the constructivist movement, on the contrary, are based on the ideas of social optimism. Using the example of the modern...
Home is a special place where time flows in a very special way. At home, the walls help, and the past never dies. Home is my fortress and a place where I meet my loved ones. Home is both a protective cover facing the outside world and a reflection of the most personal, deep and secret recesses of the soul. In the section devoted to housing, we present the materials of two round tables held with young people in Novosibirsk and Irkutsk. How do representatives of the next generation imagine their home?They will tell us about it. The problem of co-housing was already solved a hundred...
A roundtable discussion on the topic “My future home” was held in the editorial office of Project Baikal on February 28, 2023. A number of issues related to the topic of housing were proposed for the discussion: what housing is perceived as the most comfortable, cozy and convenient. Various opinions have been expressed, but the common denominator characterizes optimal housing as a place where you can feel safe and secure in the long term. At the same time, young architects have demonstrated that mobility, the ability to change their place and lifestyle is also of high value to them. In...
The current demographic situation is such that young people are becoming a dwindling minority of the population. It is all the more important to study young people’s ideas about the future, especially in such an important issue as the organisation of personal housing. The article shows the results of a frequency content analysis of the statements of a focus group of students from one of Novosibirsk universities on the topic of their housing. The texts include two arrays. One represents essays written in free form by the focus group participants. The second array was obtained in the...
The brutalism (neo brutalism) style is based on the aesthetics and ethics of honesty and a direct, unvarnished demonstration of the properties of the building material. Initially, concrete was such a material, but later brick, glass and metal entered the brutalist palette. Recently, due to the rise in the cost of all construction materials and works, interest in wood has been growing rapidly. Wood as a building material has a number of unique qualities that give housing particularly comfortable and healthy properties (salutogenicity). To do this, wood must have direct contact with the...
The article presents a methodology for studying the typology of housing for teachers on campuses. The study was conducted on the basis of a study of archival documents of projects and buildings, as well as an analysis of modern examples of coliving. As a result, based on the use of characteristic parameters, a selection of the most suitable objects was created, which formed the basis for the formation of the database.Structured information presented in the database is easy to process. This makes it possible to determine average indicators, such as the floor space – minimum, maximum...
The article examines new, previously unresearched archival materials containing the results of a survey conducted in 1936 of four well-known “socialist cities” – new housing developments at large industrial enterprises. The uniqueness of this work lies in the critical approach to the process of implementing in practice of the main urban planning concept, which was formed in the late 1920s in connection with the adopted course of forced industrialization of the country. During the survey, all the components of the concept of “socialist cities” were carefully analyzed, including planning...
This study focuses on examining the aesthetic preferences of students from different academic backgrounds in residential environments. The purpose of the study was to identify liked and disliked aesthetic characteristics among student groups with different academic backgrounds. The research involved students from various academic backgrounds, including the Departments of Architectural, Civil, Electrical Engineering, and the Department of Arabic Language. The study employed an appropriate factor analysis method to accurately assess the aesthetic quality. The study found that students’...
The article reflects the dissatisfaction with the situation in the process of training future architects. The apparent crisis of the architectural profession has been caused not only by external factors, decreasing its prestige, but also by internal factors, connected with the changes in the nature of education and the decrease in responsibility in the preparation of new personnel. The authors analyze the essence of teaching the core disciplines in the first year of training and consider it right to return to the gradual mastering of architectural design, tracing the logic and results of...
Innovations in modeling the environment of architectural objects as a database of localized events require an in-depth study of the convergence potential of the humanities and exact sciences. The ontology of the digital twin of architecture in the categorical pair “space-time” is considered in the concept of “chronolocus”, the meaning of which is reduced to the temporal exposition of architectural space as a process. Synthesis of the topological description of the architectural form at the moment of the event based on the theory of A. Gabrichevsky is seen as a necessary research step in...