At the end of 2023, we received a donation of architecture books from Roger Shrimplin, a Cambridge MA and practising architect. The books we had selected from the list Mr Shrimplin had sent to us were mainly in English, Spanish, and various East European languages, but among them was also this lovely 1985 book in Finnish and Swedish.
Electronic Collection Management
The University of Cambridge now has full access on and off campus to the DETAIL Inspiration database via this link:
https://ezp.lib.cam.ac.uk/login?url=https://www.detail-online.com/inspiration
DETAIL Inspiration
An online image and reference database for architects in the German and English language. The full-text database includes photos, drawings and technical information collected over the last 30 years. The database is optimised for mobile devices and includes a professional search function and filter option.
DETAIL contains over 3,500 architecture and construction projects and references available for download as pdf files. The database is updated monthly, with over 156 new projects and references added each year.
The King Abdulaziz Centre for World Culture, Dhahran, DETAIL Inspiration database
The University Library has recently acquired a huge facsimile set of architectural plans of St Petersburg dating from the 1730s and 1740s. Arkhitekturnye chertezhi i plany Sankt-Peterburga (2017) consists of two 52 x 37 centimetre cases of loose-leaf pages showing plans made for Friedrich Wilhelm von Bergholz, and a smaller commentary book. The publication is Russian but the plans and drawings come from the Nationalmuseum in Sweden, so the new purchase was made with money from the Slavonic and Scandinavian accessions budgets.
St Petersburg was founded by Peter the Great in 1703. Bergholz spent several years in the 1720s visiting Russia from the Duchy of Holstein, and the drawings of the new city he later commissioned and which are reprinted in this new set will be of particular interest to those looking at the early history of St Petersburg. The commentary volume gives the following English summary on its cover:
Drawings and blueprints of buildings, panoramas of streets and embankments of St. Petersburg and its suburbs from 1730s -1740s come from the collection of F.W. Bergholtz that was kept in the Swedish National Museum of Fine Arts, Stockholm. The blueprints (253 originals on 369 tablets) are mostly reproduced to scale, faithfully representing the color as well as notes made by Bergholtz himself. Almost all of them were not previously published.
Continue reading “369 plans of St Petersburg : the July 2018 Slavonic item of the month”
A little later than planned, we look in this post at a recently published guidebook to Ekaterinburg’s 1920s-1940s architecture, the first in a projected series of architectural guidebooks produced by the Tatlin publishing house. Ekaterinburg (or Sverdlovsk, as it was called from 1924 to 1991) boasts some extraordinary buildings from the first decades of Soviet power.
The last 100 years have seen a great deal of change in the physical appearance of the city. ‘Ekaterinburg : arkhitekturnyi putevoditel‘, 1920-1940′ (Ekaterinburg : an architectural guidebook, 1920-1940) contains a huge number of photographs from the early Soviet period which show a city under serious reconstruction. Intricate single-storey wooden houses on major streets sit cheek by jowl with new constructions. The former eventually disappear; their counterparts further out from the city persist in part to this day although many have been pulled down in the last decade or two to make way for new skyrises, the latter of far less obvious architectural worth than the new builds of the 1920s to 1940s.
The second CamCREES seminar of the term saw Professor Susan Reid of Sheffield University talk about the Soviet building boom of the Khrushchev era and the role of personal improvisation by residents. Using real-life examples, Professor Reid explored the complex relationship between the state programme and the craft employed by inhabitants through choice or necessity. The late 1950s and 1960s saw millions of Soviet citizens move into new housing. Construction was undertaken on a huge scale made possible by partial pre-fabrication. Visitors to the former Soviet Union will doubtless have seen panelled khrushchevki, the nickname for the blocks of flats introduced under Khrushev. Pre-made concrete panels allowed the houses to rise quickly but, as Professor Reid explained, true modern efficiency was not always achieved. Interviews conducted through the speaker’s ‘Everyday aesthetics in the modern Soviet flat’ research project in the 2000s with Soviet novosely (inhabitants of new-builds) showed that the official building work itself frequently depended on the practical input of future residents themselves, and that internal work was often unfinished, with residents left to complete installation themselves. Nevertheless, the interviewees almost all recalled the genuine excitement with which they took possession; for most, they were moving into their own flat for the first time. Continue reading “Makeshift modernity : DIY, craft and the virtuous homemaker in new Soviet housing of the 1960s”
Professor Anne Nesbet opened the new academic year’s CamCREES seminar series with a wonderful talk on Moscow architecture and Soviet films. In these bibliographical notes for the talk, we take the opportunity to look at books about the legendary Palace of the Soviets, the megalithic giant planned for central Moscow but never completed.
The 2014/15 set of CamCREES seminars started on 14 October with a fascinating talk by Professor Nesbet, in which she demonstrated that close readings of the “complicated composite shots” some 1930s Soviet films contained of Moscow’s architectural future could tell us “not only about the techniques used to construct such visions of the future, but also about cinema’s relationship to architectural history and architecture’s reciprocal interest in animation” (text taken from the talk’s abstract). Professor Nesbet works in the Department of Film & Media at UC Berkeley. Her 2007 book Savage junctures : Sergei Eisenstein and the shape of thinking is in the University Library’s South Front (415:3.c.200.1917).
The term’s third set of CamCREES notes cover the 18 February seminar at which three researchers, including two PhD students, discussed the renowned filmmakers Oleksandr Dovzhenko and Milcho Manchevski. Using the example of the recently published Dovzhenko diaries discussed at the session, the notes also look at open-access and closed-access classification in the University Library.
The third CamCREES session of the Lent term started with a talk by Dr Elena Tchougounova-Paulson about her work on the papers of the great Soviet-era director, producer, and screenwriter Oleksandr Dovzhenko (Aleksandr in Russian). His archive is collection 2081 in RGALI, the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art, where Dr Tchougounova-Paulson was a researcher. Descriptions of the Dovzhenko collection, whose contents number over 2,500 items, can be read (in Russian) starting from the collection’s front page here on RGALI’s website.
Continue reading “Dovzhenko/Manchevski : silence, speech, and the gaze”
Languages across Borders 