A Heritage, a Project, an Art Space: How White Tower is Describing Now?
Abstract
This paper considers the problem of discursive transformation in discussion about soviet avant-gard architectute. The traditional ”discours of heritage” is criticized as an approach oriented in the past. The key question is which practice makes visible actual live of constructivist objects in Russian cities. Despite the growing interest of Russian researchers to the quotidian of the provincial avant-garde, non-academic languages which describe avant-garde architecture remain unexplored. This article is aimed at reconstructing a range of practices, which makes visible today the water tower of the Uralmash socialist city (White Tower, Ekaterinburg). Content of the White Tower project’s site, of group at social network Facebook and Vkontakte is investigated. On this base significant elements of Tower’s representation are detected and described. The rejection of ”discourse of heritage” is fixed. Author propose to define new discourses as ”projective” and ”art-discourse”. New practices and languages allow to attract new subject to avant-garde heritage.
Keywords: White Tower, Uralmash, Sverdlovsk avant-garde, cultural heritage, representation of heritage, non-academic discourses
References
[1] Ilchenko, M. 2015. “The Avant-garde Architecture and Ways of Perceiving the Soviet Past in Modern Public Rhetoric.” X Kolosnitsynskie chteniya. Sovetsky sotsiokul’turnyy proekt: istorichesky shans ili global’naya antiutopiya: materialy Mezhdunarodnoy nauchnoy konferentsii. Ekaterinburg: Humanitarian University.
[2] Ilchenko, M. 2016. “Uralmash in the Architecture of the Soviet Avant-garde: an Experiment in City Construction in the 1920s and 1930s.”Quaestio Rossica, 3: 55–71.
[3] Kochukhova, E. 2014. “The White Tower. Revitalisation of Ekaterinburg’s Cultural Heritage.” Labirint. Journal of Social and Humanities Research, 1: 77-81.
[4] Kochukhova E., and E. Rabinovich E. 2015. “Open Air ’Cultural-political Complex’: Central Park of the 1930s vs Clubs’ Parks of the 1920s” [the Case of Sverdlovsk]. Labirint. Journal of Social and Humanities Research, 2: 6-18.
[5] Meerovich, M. 2017. Urban Policy in the USSR (1917-1929). From the Garden City to the Departmental Workers’ Village. Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie.
[6] “Objects of Cultural Heritage in Ekaterinburg”. Ministry of State Property Management of the Sverdlovsk Region. Retrieved from: http://mugiso.midural.ru/region/okn/ estateekt.php?ELEMENT_ID=591
[7] Piskunova, L.P. and L. E. Starostova. 2015. “Ekaterinburg’s ‘Chekist Town’: An Objectification and Transformation of Utopia in Everyday Practices of the Soviet Elite.” Izvestiya Uralskogo Federalnogo Universiteta, Series 3: Social Sciences 4: 40- 52.
[8] Site’s Home Page. N.D. Retrieved from: http://www.tower1929.ru
[9] Smirnov, L.N. 2008. Constructivism in the Monuments of Architecture of the Sverdlovsk Region. Independent Institute of the History of Material Culture.
[10] Stepanov, A.V. and T.M. Stepanova. 2014. “Constructivism in the Structure of the Architectural Style of Ekaterinburg Identity”. Akademicheskij vestnik UralNIIproekt RAASN, 2: 15-19.
[11] “The Project’s Conception – 2012”. Retrieved from: http://www.tower1929.ru/ dokumenty-proekta
[12] The White Tower Project. N.D. Facebook [fan page, shared link]. Retrieved from: https://www.facebook.com/tower1929/
[13] Timofeev, М. 2016. “From ‘Red Manchester’ to ‘Red Disneyland’: Constructivist Architecture and the Representation of Ivanovo.” Quaestio Rossica, 3: 72–92.
[14] Bashnya, B. N.D. Vkontakte [account]. Retrieved from: https://vk.com/tower1929