The Searching for the Image of Church Building through the Late Russian Empire (Marginalia of a Mainstream Architectural History)

Abstract

The article attempts to describe the history a search for an image of the Orthodox church building as a modern structure in the late Russian Empire (mid XIX — early XX centuries). In literature, this period is usually given through the style framework. Indeed, a question of style formation had been highly important for contemporaries as both critics and architects wrote a lot about producing churches in traditional national forms, etc. However, it would not be enough for a church architecture of the industrial era experiencing the growth of city population that expressed in a bigger number of parishioners, the usage of new materials and building structures and, finally, the new cultural and worldview realities. It is interesting how the cultural imagination of its contemporaries depicted a modern temple architecture of that time.