Authors

Zhurin Nikolai P.
THE FIRST WORLD WAR AND SOVIET AVANT-GARDE IN ARCHITECTURE AND DESIGN

Architecton: Proceedings of Higher Education №1 (53) March, 2016

The article is devoted to the little-studied art and style forming role of the First World War (1914-1918) in the evolution of Russian avant-garde in architecture and design. Image visualisation and design experience gained by the 1920s generation over the war years influenced the spatial forms of early Constructivist architecture and design works. Noteworthy is certain similarity between the functional character of the prewar and war-period capital fortification plans and the functional plans and spaces of the tangible artworks of Soviet avant-garde. The author regards new warfare means as an artistic image for visualisation in postwar avant-garde architecture and design.

Zhurin Nikolai P.
GERMAN ARCHITECT R. WOLTERS AND THE ARCHITECTURE OF CONSTRUCTIVISM IN NOVOSIBIRSK

Architecton: Proceedings of Higher Education №4 (52) December, 2015

The article discusses and analyzes "Specialist in Siberia", the memories of the German architect R. Wolters who visited the Soviet Union in the early 1930s. R. Wolters' attitude towards the architecture of Soviet constructivism in Novosibirsk is studied. I consider the sources of his creative views that took shape during his vocational training together with A. Speer at Munich and Berlin Technical Universities under the tutelage of Professor H. Tessonow. There are differences in the basic aesthetic inclinations of R. Wolters and the aesthetics and practice of German modernism. His professional concepts are logically projected onto the architecture of Soviet constructivism in Novosibirsk, which R. Wolters ignored or treated critically in his memoirs. Later, in Germany, in the era of the Third Reich, where R. Wolters worked in A. Speer’s team and acquired a certain standing in architecture, his creativity as one of the authors of Berlin’s reconstruction and a leading member of the Todt Organization clearly did not coincide with the aesthetic principles of Avant-Garde in the first third of the 20th century.