Academic architectural school. The problem of stylistic selfidentification

Abstract

The article explores the long journey traversed by an academic architectural school from the moment of the establishment of the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts in the middle of the 18th century, to the end of the 20th century. The author focuses on the degree of distinctiveness of the classical fundamentals of the school, as well as to what extent traditions of the academic educational system were followed. An overview of the school’s activities during the first century of its existence makes it possible to define the principles underlying this system: a focus on classic examples, the use of an architectural order as a basis for all compositional decisions, the preference for regularly composed (“beautiful”) planes, high graphic skills, and the interaction of artists of different specialties to form a synthesis of the arts. The article presents some stages of the school’s historical evolution: the period of classicism in the first century of the existence of the Academy of Arts; the period between the reforms that took place in 1859 and 1893; the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, a period of highest perfection in structure and methodology; and from the post-revolutionary period to the present, a time of confrontation between traditionalism and innovative trends.