Authors

Burtsev Alexander G.
THE HOUSE OF DOCTOR SEREBROVSKY IN EKATERINBURG

Architecton: Proceedings of Higher Education №3 (55) September, 2016

The low rise buildings by architect K.T.Babykin are almost unknown to the public. This article summarizes the results of an archival and field study which allowed us to identify one such project, the private house of doctor Serebrovsky in Ekaterinburg. The house displays a number of signs of simplified Art Nouveau. The fate of the building was closely associated with the activities of the housing co-operative "Opytstroy". Its very existence points to the need to investigate the practice of urban detached housing construction the mid-1920s. The study suggests that this building should be recognized as an object of cultural-historical heritage.

Burtsev Alexander G.
HISTORY AND HERITAGE OF THE «OPYTSTROY» CO-OPERATIVE

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

The activities of housing co-operatives during the New Economic Policy period in Sverdlovsk are one of the «blank spots» in national history of architecture. The article describes the activities of the "Opytstroy" partnership, which was mostly composed of representatives of the city’s technical intelligentsia, and addresses the specifics of the plans and structural solutions of their built projects and reveals the difficult relationships of co-ops with the State. Archival records and field surveys of the partnership’s remaining buildings suggest that in this case the level of realisation of self-help housing construction was considerably inferior to that in Europe.

Burtsev Alexander G.
CONSTRUCTION OF LOW-RISE DETACHED HOUSING IN THE CITY OF SVERDLOVSK IN 1923-1929

Architecton: Proceedings of Higher Education №3 (51) September, 2015

The practice of constructing low-rise housing by prospective owners during the period of the New Economic Policy in the USSR and, specifically, in Sverdlovsk (now Ekaterinburg) has been little studied so far. The article identifies the scope and character of amateur building of low-rise housing in Sverdlovsk. The results obtained through analysis of archival sources and field studies have enabled the chronology of this phenomenon to be described, areas of such construction and building types to be identified, and certain specific features in the application of the development rights to be revealed. The author concludes that this method of construction was economically more accessible for broad groups of the population in comparison with housing co-operatives.

Burtsev Alexander G.
SELF-BUILT HOUSING IN SVERDLOVSK IN 1924-25. COOPERATIVES AND OWNER-BUILDERS

Architecton: Proceedings of Higher Education №4 (48) December, 2014

The domestic research literature has described sufficiently well the general pattern of worker housing construction in the 1920s. At the same time, the building programmes of housing co-operatives and the activities of personal self-builders in provinces, and in Sverdlovsk in particular, has yet been little studied. This article is an attempt to classify public, co-operative and personal entities who participated in low-rise housing construction in Sverdlovsk in 1924-25. Based on archival materials and information from periodicals, the author has identified the regional specifics of self-help housing construction in Sverdlovsk during the period under study: the infancy of housing co-operatives along with considerable activity of personal and spontaneous builders. The local co-operative building societies were characterized by construction at scattered sites within the then existing borders of the city of Sverdlovsk.

Burtsev Alexander G.
TOWARDS THEORETICAL FOUNDATIONS FOR THE STUDY OF HISTORY OF SELF-HELP HOUSING CONSTRUCTION IN RUSSIA

Architecton: Proceedings of Higher Education №3 (47) September, 2014

The programmes of accessible housing construction adopted by the government of the Russian Federation are not giving tangible results. More than 40 % of the housing commissioned annually is built by private individuals. However, self-help house building and co-operative housing construction have so far been studied mainly with regard to their economic and legal aspects. In general, Russian researchers continue regarding these developments in the negative. The theoretical basis for research into the history of self-help building in the USSR and Russia has been obtained from English-language publications, which provide a more comprehensive view of this phenomenon. As a result of reviewing the terminology and definitions describing this architectural phenomenon and form of inexpensive housing provision, the author proposes to distinguish two aspects of such construction: "organised" and "spontaneous". A review of the most common conclusions drawn by international researchers has suggested further lines of research into this significant socio-cultural phenomenon. In the longer term, this will allow realistic programs of organised self-help low-rise housing construction to be developed in Russia.

Burtsev Alexander G.
COLLECTIVE SUBJECTS OF COMMUNICATION IN SPATIAL SEMIOTICS

Architecton: Proceedings of Higher Education №1 (33) March, 2011

The pragmatic dimension of any system of signs is self-evidently important from the practical point of view. However, communication processes realized by means of architectural structures and objectivities in urbanised environments lack an adequate, structural description. The systematization of concepts undertaken in this article is aimed to provide a basis for further interdisciplinary studies at the interface between theory of architecture, sociology and semiotics.

One of the essential differences of semiotics of this type from related (literature and painting) and other genres of art is a collective character of subjects of communication (addressers, in the first place). In the first part of the article, the author provides justifications for the use of some of the concepts from sociology (aggregation, audience, crowd, social group, etc.) in semiotic studies. Such borrowing is possible on the basis of the categories "activity" and "information", which are common to sociology and semiotics.

Relations between subjects in the semiotics of an urbanised environment are considered as the creation of various messages on the basis of codes and their decoding in the course of activity. The author’s analysis of subject-to-subject interactions between social entities allows for their involvement in various aspects of communication: praxeological, gnoseological and axiological, realised by means of urbanised environment semiotics. Ultimately, the author provides a systematisation of social entities in the form of a matrix by the degree of participation in the above three aspects of communication and comes to the logical conclusion that the most fully participating members of the communication process under study are entities with the most complex internal organisation of joint activities, i.e. social groups.

Burtsev Alexander G.
THE «BORDERLINE» ARCHITECTURE OF RUSSIA

Architecton: Proceedings of Higher Education №4 (28) December, 2009

The article is devoted to the issue of studying domestic non-professional "borderline" architecture of the last decades. This stratum of architectural creativity has not been investigated in national or international theory of architecture. Private construction in out-of-town gardening cooperatives and ‘cottage’ and small settlements has been developing rapidly in the Russian Federation during this period and has generated an improbable variety of architectural forms. The author outlines some aspects of the further research programme: terminological, semiotic, social, intellectual and structural.