Northern lights - Art Nouveau in Russian architecture

UNESCO Courier, August, 1990 by Maria Nashtshokina, Boris Kirikov

Northern lights

ART Nouveau in Russian architecture was accompanied by a profound interest in old traditions. At the turn of the century, the enchantments of Nordic art, with its powerful streak of archaism, were rediscovered, and Russian artists dreamed of combining modernn art techniques with images from the folklore and wild natural beauty of the north.

They were captivated not only by the medieval and vernacular architecture of northern Russia, but also by the culture of Finland and the Scandinavian countries. For as well as being neighbours, or, in the case of the Principality of Finland, linked to the Russian empire, these countries were seen as being spiritually united. This was the beginning of what Sergei Diaghilev called a "Nordic Renaissance", in which curiosity about the past and the Nordic identity rooted in it combined with a strong desire to explore all the possibilities of new forms of expression.

There were two major trends. The first was the neo-Russian style, which drew inspiration from the architecture of Novgorod, Pskov and northern Russia, and flourished in Moscow. The second, with which this article is concerned, was modern Nordic art, a branch of Art Nouveau that flourished mainly in the then capital of Russia, St. Petersburg (today Leningrad). Its rise was closely linked to Finnish and, to a lesser extent, Swedish "national Romanticism".

The affinities between the Finnish and the St. Petersburg schools of architecture, nurtured by geographical proximity, were further accentuated by the presence in St. Petersburg of practising Finnish architects and by joint participation in national and international exhibitions. The versatile painter Akseli W. Gallen-Kallela (1865-1931), well-known for his paintings inspired by the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala, was one of the fathers of Finnish national Romanticism. He took part in the Russian national exhibition held at Nizhni-Novgorod in 1896 and in others held in St. Petersburg, and produced many architectural projects for St. Petersburg, Moscow and Revel (now Tallinn).

Russian and Finnish architects harmoniosuly combined technical innovation and extreme stylization of Scandinavian, Russian and Karelo-Finnish art motifs--solar symbols, animal and plant images--and skilfully combined natural materials such as wood and stone.

The favoured setting for this style, St. Petersburg, was a city with two faces. On the one hand it was a bourgeois, mercantile, European city looking out over the Baltic, a monumental, rapidly-growing Rome of the north. On the other it was the result of an extraordinary encounter between the force of its natural setting and the force of the human will, an ephemeral Babylon in danger of being swallowed up by the marshlands on which it had been built.

Nostalgia for the beauty of the natural world found full expression in modern Nordic art. In the architecture of many St. Petersburg buildings this love of Nature, so extreme that Diaghilev described it as "pagan adoration", burst forth on facades teeming with stylized animals, birds, fish, trees and flowers. Under Finnish prompting, the expressive potential of rough, grainy surfaces such as that of granite, and the evocative power of combinations of natural and man-made materials, were revealed. The rough masonry of the walls recalled old Celtic legends of "evil stones". Beneath the surface of daily life were strong romantic undercurrents.

At that time there were Swedish and Finnish colonies in St. Petersburg. Born in St. Petersburg, but of Swedish nationality, the brilliant architect F. Lidval was the father of Nordic Modernism in the city. His first major work (1899-1904), a forerunner of the masterpieces he later created in Sweden, was an apartment house at 1-3 Kamenoostrovsky Avenue (now Kirovskiy Avenue) which displays all the characteristics of the new style--free interplay of volumes, diversity of window-design, subtle harmonization of materials, and, from the mysterious world of the forest, ornamentation whose profusion in no way detracts from the building's rational functionalism.

Perhaps the finest jewel in the crown of St. Petersburg Nordic architecture is an apartment building at 11 Stremiannaia Street (1906-1907) by N. Vasiliev and A. Bubir. The highly stylized symbolism of the ornamentation blends with the architectural structure to form an organic whole. The elegant simplification of form to which Nordic Modernism aspired here achieves perfection.

It was in such buildings that the Nordic Renaissance subtly reaffirmed the Baltic character of St. Petersburg, while leaving its European aspects untouched.

MARIA NASHTSHOKINA, of the USSR, is a researcher with the National Institute of the Theory of Architecture and Town Planning, Moscow.

BORIS KIRIKOV, of the USSR, is a researcher with the Institute of the Theory of Architecture and Town Planning, Leningrad.