Yury Volchok
Moscow Architectural Institute (State Academy); Research Institute of Theory and History of Architecture and Urban Planning, Russia
In 1926 N. M. Bakhtin (the eldest of the brothers) wrote, “Any genuine creative work perceives itself not as a start or continuation but as a revival — it is how this one and only law may be laid down”. The revival of the notion of “fine” has become one of the aims in matching historical and theoretical issues related to architectural criticism at the present stage of architectonic thinking integrated into the non-linear world perception. The return to one of the earliest interpretations of “fine” (by H. Poincaré) as a result of harmonious and complete internal structure of any integral unit provides intellectual content for visual perception of architectural form. The application of this notion may become a methodical basis for the establishment of the essentially “fine” dialogue between the history and the evolution within the logics of the “Grand-Time Architectonics” (M. M. Bakhtin).
The attention to the creative trends resulting from the Renaissance world perception in the architecture of the 1920s was rather strong and meaningful. I will illustrate it with two examples. The Dictionary of Art Terms was created by the National Academy of Art Sciences in 1923–1929. The notion of “architecture” had acquired by that time the stable possibility of various readings, and the authors preferred to include into the dictionary two articles: by A. G. Gabrichevskiy and M. Ya. Ginzburg. Ginzburg also used as the epigraph in his book Style and Epoch (1924) the words by G. WÖlfflin, “Movement starts simultaneously at many points. The old regenerates carrying everything with it, and, at last, a new style becomes a fact. But why did all this have to happen?” Fixing attention on the above issue, the author started the review of his colleagues’ works with examples form then current oeuvre of I. V. Zholtovskiy and explained that it was important to him to demonstrate how the “sense of a new form” and “the genetic value in a new style formation” reveal themselves.
Therefore, the process of revelation and validation of the “genetic” line in the establishment of the new, intellectually intensive world perception shall be in a due course revived in the contemporary architectural criticism.