Voci di San Pietroburgo. L'architettura del saper fare neoclassico per gli zar

This book brings together a series of texts on the experiences and events relating to architecture in San Petersburg in the last decades of Catherine the Great (1762-1796) and the first years following her reign.
The builders and workmen employed were men whose language, origins and traditions differed, but who were connected by a common response to the circumstances and the requests of exceptional patrons. The buildings erected by Italians, Russians, French, Scottish and Germans do not correspond to twentieth-century interpretations but are here revised in the light of new standards. Also, this goes some way to clarifying aspects of architecture in Western Europe at that same time.
Western experts from many backgrounds were nominated to erect the structures of the Russian State that Peter desired; to build the imperial capital on the Baltic, builders and experts whose language, origins and traditions differed were called from all over Europe. In this cosmopolitan environment buildings were raised that made little or no reference to individual characteristics pertaining to a particular race, descent, or group: what resulted was an supra-national' architecture that responded to a new reality; as such it was marked by an original classicism intended for a infinitely distant future.
Catherine, in the last decades of her reign, wanted to be surrounded by architects employed in achieving that objective who did not refer to myths, idealised realities or pre-established doctrines or principles; men who did not rely on universally-recognised rules, models and types deriving from the antique, or from the geometry or taste for proportion and basic volumes that the most heeded Italian and French doctrinarians were espousing. Rather, these architects used a language deriving from any episode they believed went beyond current and everyday values, and they operated in ways suggested by experiences they considered positive and the theories born from them. They did not feel bound to follow rigid rules, and were ready to delve deep into particular situations; they were able to understand the affinities that surfaced in differing cases, and take advantage of them, with the aim of proceeding strategically to achieve the desired result. In any case, their knowledge needed to coincide with know how.
This splendid experience involved only a few men and did not last long; it was anticipated, and soon overcome, by rival tendencies, which were destined to prevail and protract in time and which came to shape the diverse forms of twentieth-century architecture, and which almost exclusively drew the attention of historiography and critics of that century.