Recontextualization of architectural heritage of the Soviet avant-garde: exhibition project "Sverdlovsk villages: from architectural project to social experience"

The article analyzes the experience of the research group from Yekaterinburg on the organization of an exhibition on the constractivist villages of Sverdlovsk. The authors consider the possibilities and results of working with the architectural heritage as a phenomenon of public history and of modern man's interaction with the historical experience of the "Soviet". The authors prove that the architectural exhibition can become a basis for reconfiguring (in Paul Ricoeur's vision) historical experience through its new contextualization. The authors substantiate the possibility of working with the avant-garde architectural heritage as a phenomenon of public history and reveal the specifics of the presence of the architectural avant-garde in the cultural field of Sverdlovsk / Yekaterinburg. Its constractivist past appears to be an important, but underestimated plot in urban identity, that takes city history beyond the usual Soviet narrative. The authors consider the experience of implementing Utopia in the space of the new avant-garde architecture, the forms and the results of adapting the inhabitants of Sverdlovsk to life under new conditions. Various forms of the presence of constractivist objects in modern semantic field of Yekaterinburg are analyzed, both in the form of urban legends and in the form of a not-spoken and not realized, but significant experience. The objects of the analysis are interviews with residents and workers of institutions in constractivist complexes, private and archive photographs of buildings and interiors of consttuctivist apartments (cells), newspapers articles, guides about Soviet Sverdlovsk, and the reflected experience of social interaction of people in those spaces and its subsequent interpretation. The authors also present their experience of organizing an architectural exhibition as a form of work with historical experience in a public field.