Natalia Grigorieva
The Union of Moscow Architects, Russia
Focusing interdisciplinary research on the history of a Moscow city mansion of the 17th–20th centuries, the author undertakes a study of the progressive accretion of cultural potential in local material objects of urban space. In fact, it is this accumulation process that converts an architectural site into a ‘cultural nest’, a bearer of historical and civilisation heritage. The author traces the formation of sustainable and developing in time socio-cultural complexes that are directly related to or associated with such sites and, above all, with the destiny of their inhabitants, guests, observers and chroniclers of everyday life.
One of the pivotal moments which had a decisive impact on architectural appearance and on the fate of the mansion at No 9, Povarskaya, in general, relates to the late 19th — early 20th century. This period is associated with the ambitious restructuring of the old-Moscow estate of the early 19th century, as well as with the change of its function into a representative mansion of the new cultural and business elite of Russia. The transformation of the mansion in “il palazzo delle arti” in imitation of the Renaissance artifacts is connected with the last owners of the estate, among which there were the Botkin, the Shchukin, the Zetlin and the Wissotzky families, as well as with architects Ivan Kuznetsov and Adolf Zeligson, painters Mikhail Vrubel, Ilya Repin, Valentin Serov, poet Afanasy Fet, composer-academist Alexander Gretchaninov, and later many artists of the Silver Age of Russian art.