Metabolism of Architecture in Late-18th-Century Tsarskoye Selo

• In Event: Erasure and Resilience in Eastern European Architectures

Abstract

Charles-Louis Clérisseau’s designs for ‘ancient destructions’ go beyond the melancholic appeal of artificial ruins. Instead, they challenge the boundary between man-made modular conventions and the material interchangeability of natural dissolution and growth. By juxtaposing Clérisseau’s unknown series of presentation drawings for unrealised countryside houses at Tsarskoye Selo, and the artificial ruins by Giacomo Quarenghi they inspired in conversation with the ‘Rozvaliny’ poem by Gavriil Derzhavin, one will illuminate the interaction between obliteration and survival of Russian imperial prospects at the turn of the 19th century.

Author

• Aleksander Musiał, ETH Zurich (Switzerland)