Svetlana Babadzhan
State Institute of Art Studies, Moscow, Russia
Neoclassical style in Russian architecture of the 1910s is a multicompound and contradictory phenomenon. However, contemporaries comprehended it in the context of the iconographic evolution: from the neo-empire style to the revival of “taste of Italian architects” of the Renaissance. Construction in Moscow is only a partial subject to this concept, formulated by G. Loukomski, a St. Petersburg architect. The Renaissance design of the construction of mansions is not widespread in Moscow, where stylistic treatments are mostly focused on the heritage of Russian classicism of the second half of the 18th — first quarter of the 19th century. Nevertheless, the work of a prominent architect D. Adamovich shows a deviation from the Art Nouveau stylizations to the image of a classic manor house and, finally, to the Renaissance architectural approach, clearly manifested in S. Ryabushinsky’s mansion (1915–1916).
The Renaissance design of the construction of neoclassical mansions, as a separate problem, is not widely investigated by researchers. The established conclusion is that the neoclassical mansion inherits the methods of planning developed in the era of eclecticism and Art Nouveau. The purpose of the report is not only to indicate the ability of the neoclassical style to affect the ordering of the plan and the spatial composition of the mansion, but also to show that the Renaissance stage of the neoclassical style is able to demonstrate the most independent and completed in their principles versions of plan, spatial patterns, facade compositions and interior decoration.
The report will examine the evolution of the neoclassical style in the construction of mansions by D. V. Adamovich, whose work has not yet been honored with the research, and also will touch upon a number of neo-classical mansions, which are not examined in the specialized literature.