Vol 2, No 2 (2017)

The role of public buildings designed and built between the mid-1950s and the late 1970s has changed significantly during the present time, which is defined as the “postindustrial period”. It should be noted that many of these facilities throughout the country were built according to standard designs. The qualitative changes that are currently taking place in the approaches to the architectural design of public buildings, in a certain way affected the fate of public buildings and structures from 1950-1970. The typical design in the end of the 1970s was replaced by the design of individual projects. Thus, in the city of Gorky (Nizhny Novgorod had this name from 1932 to 1990), during this period, an individual design department was created at the “Gorkovgrazhdanproekt” design institute [1], but the legacy of the designated period is quite large, occupies a large amount in the total share of institutions and service enterprises, and therefore requires reflection. In this regard, the current issues are the search for architectural solutions to adapt these objects for modern use. The objective of this paper, based on the analysis of the Nizhny Novgorod experience, is to identify the factors that influenced the change of public service systems in the period of 1955-1975, as well as methods of changing the architectural appearance, planning decisions, the composition of public buildings during reconstruction and their adaptation to new functions.

The article deals with the problems of the evolutionary post-industrial transformation of the city on the example of the large city of Orenburg, an attempt was made to see some of the possibilities of the existing landscape frame of the city that can be used in its post-industrial development. The paper discusses the following issues: conditions for the formation of the ecological frame of Orenburg in conjunction with its evolution; the possibility of using the ecological framework of the city in order to humanize the urban environment; quality problems of public spaces of the city; imbalance of the functional and spatial development of the city; lag in the development of systems of social business centers, overcoming the mono-functionality of commuter belts; possible ways of development of Orenburg, taking into account the natural potential.

Identification of the entire spectrum of life-activity and functional-activity dependencies of large masses of people on significant and organized territories requires engagement of huge flows of information. The processing of the knowledge arrays, which are prohibitively large for individual specialists, requires fundamentally new conditions of professional activity of the abstract integration plan. Noospheric synarchiotectonics, which is a new research and design approach of research and management influence, offers a wide range of tools of high cultural-philosophical and economic-civilizational content. There should always be a sphere or area in its structure for possible maneuver that cannot miss out from the field of attention of professional teams of specialists of a different profile, many different factors, qualities, properties. Any of them can drastically affect the prospects for the sustainable development of the administrative divisions of the country involved in urban planning and urban megapolisation.

Nowadays in many European cities, the authorities are taking steps to restrict and even ban car traffic. The reason is not even ecological, but in the simple impossibility of using a car in the city due to constant difficulties in movement. The article describes the principles of Soviet disurbanism, which predicted such a situation as early as the late 1920s, and offered a way out of it. The ideas of disurbanism, perceived as utopia (and partly the former utopia), came to the United States absolutely independently - Frank Lloyd Wright, and then Homer Hoyt, finally formulated the idea of a dispersed city. This idea predetermined the birth of the American suburb, which today is the main place to live in large American cities. The article describes the history of construction and features of one of the most famous suburbs - Levittown (New York), which became the prototype for many similar residential areas throughout the country. The paper reveals the reasons for its shortcomings and limitations that were overcome during the housing construction of several other American cities (in particular, Houston), which led to their sustainable development and growth.

The territorial-cluster approach is a promising direction for the development of modern megacities. Under the leadership of the author, the concept of a “food safety belt” has been developed for the urban planning system of Big Volgograd. The essence of this work lies in the formation of a system of agro-industrial and agrarian clusters in the suburban area of the Volga metropolis. The paper considers the concept of «agro-economic cluster», its function and defines its constituent objects. The author develops a typology of agro-economic clusters, and their link to settlements - supporting centers.

The article is devoted to the reassessment of the cultural phenomenon of architectural style in terms of explosive growth and popularization of information flows. Now, thanks to the growth of the communicative capabilities of modern communications, the discourse of unprofessional vulgarizing texts on the theory of architecture is rapidly growing. The authors offer a set of metaphors and oppositions to an amateur for a more correct understanding of the essence of what is happening in the profession. The authors believe that the popularization and explanation of the professional understanding of actual problems is an important work of the professional community to achieve a public understanding of the goals and values of the architectural profession. The result of such work should be the development of a generally acceptable system of values for the renewal of the criterion of formal quality as an essential part of culture.

In the essay “the Odyssey” by Homer is called a metaphorical and metaphysical code that causes the architectural formation of the “hermeneutic circle” of a specific architectural concept of language in the field of cultural scenography, which connects the binary formula “Home-City” with the plot of fate, which is generally based on the idea of search and discovering the house.