Since its initial publication in 1993, A History of Russian Architecture has remained the most comprehensive study of the topic in English, a volume that defines the main components and sources for Russia's architectural traditions in their historical context, from the early medieval period to the present. This edition includes 80 new full-page color separations, many of which are published here for the first time, as well as a new Prologue and elegant photographic essay drawn from the author's research and fieldwork over the past decade in remote areas of the Russian north and Siberia. Subject to influences from east and west, Russian architecture's distinctive approaches to building are documented in four parts of this definitive study: early medieval Rus up to the Mongol invasion in the mid-twelfth century; the revival of architecture in Novgorod and Muscovy from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries; Peter the Great's cultural revolution, which extended through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; and the advent of modern, avant-garde, and monumental Soviet architecture. Beautifully illustrated and carefully researched, A History of Russian Architecture provides an invaluable cultural history that will be of interest to scholars and general audiences alike. View the William C. Brumfield Russian Architecture Collection online at http://content.lib.washington.edu/brumfieldweb/index.html

This is the first book to show the development of Russian architecture over the past thousand years as a part of the history of Western architecture. Dmitry Shvidkovsky, Russia’s leading architectural historian, departs from the accepted notion that Russian architecture developed independent of outside cultural influences and demonstrates that, to the contrary, the influence of the West extends back to the tenth century and continues into the present. He offers compelling assessments of all the main masterpieces of Russian architecture and frames a radically new architectural history for Russia. The book systematically analyzes Russian buildings in relation to developments in European art, pointing out where familiar European features are expressed in Russian projects. Special attention is directed toward decorations based on Byzantine models; the heritage of Italian master builders and carvers; the impact of architects and others sent by Elizabeth I; the formation of the Russian Imperial Baroque; the Enlightenment in Russian art; and 19th- and 20th-century European influences. With over 300 specially commissioned photographs of sites throughout Russia and western Europe, this magnificent book is both beautiful and groundbreaking.

This collection of thirteen vignettes addresses several important episodes in the history of Russian temporary architecture and public art, from the royal festivals during the times of Peter the Great up to the recent venues including the Sochi Winter Olympics. The forms and the circumstances of their design were drastically different; however, the projects discussed in the book share a common feature: they have been instrumental in the construction of Russia’s national identity, with its perception of the West - simultaneously, a foe and a paragon - looming high over this process. The book offers a history of multidirectional relationships between diplomacy, propaganda, and architecture.

The twentieth century in Russia has been a cataclysm of rare proportions, as war, revolution, famine, and massive political terror tested the limits of human endurance. The results of this assault on Russian culture are particularly evident in ruined architectural monuments, some of which are little known even within Russia itself. Over the past two decades William Craft Brumfield, noted historian of Russian architecture, has traveled throughout Russia and photographed many of these neglected, lost buildings, haunting in their ruin. Lost Russia provides a unique view of Brumfield's acclaimed work, which illuminates Russian culture as reflected in these remnants of its distinctive architectural traditions.

An essential exploration of how Russian ideas about the United States shaped architecture and urban design from the czarist era to the fall of the U.S.S.R. Idealized representations of America, as both an aspiration and a menace, played an important role in shaping Russian architecture and urban design from the American Revolution until the fall of the Soviet Union. Jean-Louis Cohen traces the powerful concept of “Amerikanizm” and its impact on Russia’s built environment from early czarist interest in Revolutionary America, through the spectacular World’s Fairs of the 19th century, to department stores, skyscrapers, and factories built in Russia using American methods during the 20th century. Visions of America also captivated the Russian avant-garde, from El Lissitzky to Moisei Ginzburg, and Cohen explores the ongoing artistic dialogue maintained between the two countries at the mid-century and in the late Soviet era, following a period of strategic competition. This first major study of Amerikanizm in the architecture of Russia makes a timely contribution to our understanding of modern architecture and its broader geopolitics.

Carpeted in boreal forests, dotted with lakes, cut by rivers, and straddling the Arctic Circle, the region surrounding the White Sea, which is known as the Russian North, is sparsely populated and immensely isolated. It is also the home to architectural marvels, as many of the original wooden and brick churches and homes in the region's ancient villages and towns still stand. Featuring nearly two hundred full color photographs of these beautiful centuries-old structures, Architecture at the End of the Earth is the most recent addition to William Craft Brumfield's ongoing project to photographically document all aspects of Russian architecture. The architectural masterpieces Brumfield photographed are diverse: they range from humble chapels to grand cathedrals, buildings that are either dilapidated or well cared for, and structures repurposed during the Soviet era. Included are onion-domed wooden churches such as the Church of the Dormition, built in 1674 in Varzuga; the massive walled Transfiguration Monastery on Great Solovetsky Island, which dates to the mid-1550s; the Ferapontov-Nativity Monastery's frescoes, painted in 1502 by Dionisy, one of Russia's greatest medieval painters; nineteenth-century log houses, both rustic and ornate; and the Cathedral of St. Sophia in Vologda, which was commissioned by Ivan the Terrible in the 1560s. The text that introduces the photographs outlines the region's significance to Russian history and culture. Brumfield is challenged by the immense difficulty of accessing the Russian North, and recounts traversing sketchy roads, crossing silt-clogged rivers on barges and ferries, improvising travel arrangements, being delayed by severe snowstorms, and seeing the region from the air aboard the small planes he needs to reach remote areas. The buildings Brumfield photographed, some of which lie in near ruin, are at constant risk due to local indifference and vandalism, a lack of maintenance funds, clumsy restorations, or changes in local and national priorities. Brumfield is concerned with their futures and hopes that the region's beautiful and vulnerable achievements of master Russian carpenters will be preserved. Architecture at the End of the Earth is at once an art book, a travel guide, and a personal document about the discovery of this bleak but beautiful region of Russia that most readers will see here for the first time.

This book offers a comprehensive account of Russia’s architectural production from the late nineteenth century to the present, explaining how its architecture was both shaped by and came to embody Russia’s rapid cultural, economic, and social revolutions over the past century. Richard Anderson looks at Russia’s complex relationship to global architectural culture, exploring the country’s central presence in the Rationalism and Constructivism movements of the 1920s, as well as its role as a key protagonist during the Cold War. Looking deeply at Soviet Russia, he brings the relationship between architecture and socialism into focus through detailed case studies that situate buildings and architectural concepts within the socialist milieu of Soviet society. He tracks the way Russian architectural institutions departed from the course of modernism being developed in capitalist countries, and he reappraises the architecture of the Stalin era and the final decades of the USSR. Finally, he traces the influence of Soviet conventions on contemporary Russian architecture—which is now a more heterogeneous mix of approaches and styles— and how it made a lasting and little-known impact on territories extending from the Middle East, to Central Asia, and into China. A bold new assessment of Russia’s architectural legacy and contemporary contributions, this book is a fascinating exploration of a tumultuous place—and the creativity that has come from it.