VELONOTTE™ ROMA 2010

During the night between the 8 and 9 May 2010 a Grand Tour of contemporary architecture and history will take place in Rome. The event is the brainchild of Sergey Nikitin, a young university lecturer from Moscow, who talks about how the initiative, that has already taken place in various forms in Russia, came about.

The MosKultProg™ project, or "Cultural projects in Moscow", was established in 1997 with the idea of sharing the academic study of contemporary architecture with a broader public. This intention was made concrete first with walks around parts of the centre and the suburbs of Moscow led by academics. These were followed by tours using public transport such as tram, metro and bus and then finally by itineraries moving around by bicycle, known as Velonotte™. After three of these had taken place with over 1500 people participating, it was such a success that the BBC called it "the biggest scientific seminar in the world", attracting the attention of the Russian and international media.

Over a ten-year period, MoskultprogTM organised around a hundred events, in Moscow and various cities in Russia and abroad such as St Petersburg, Tver, Novgorod and Kiev. Leading Russian scholars took part in the tours - historians such as Valentin Yanin and Andrey Zaliznyak, scholars of architecture and urban studies such as Natalia Dushkina, Vladimir Paperny, Sergey Khachaturov and many others. A number of projects were instigated in collaboration with prestigious national institutions such as the Tretyakov Gallery, the Museum of History in St Petersburg, the Lomonosov state university in Moscow (MGU) and the Higher Institute for Architecture in Moscow (MARKhi).

We initially began with the presentation of the avant-garde patrimony (masterpieces such as the workers Club by Melnikov and the Vesnins), before moving on to anonymous complexes in the suburbs and the socio-urbanistic aspects of the capital.

Among the more prominent themes that are currently being addressed is everyday life in urban complexes and communities and the persistency of models from Stalinist Moscow in the modern city. A series of initiatives in Moscow, St Petersburg and Baku (today in Azerbaijan), called "Sravnitelnoe dvorovedenie" ("comparative courtyardology"), presented and described - with the help of architect Mikhail Khazanov, journalist Sergey Buntman, ethnographs lya Utekhin and Aleksandra Piir – the life of young people after the Second World War, through the socio-urbanistic phenomenon of the courtyard (dvor).
Together with Maria Makogonova (from the St Petersburg museum of history) we set up a project dedicated to the urban villas of high Russian society in the 1900s in the Kammenyi ostrov (Stone Island) of St Petersburg. Another subject addressed has been the formation and structure of the principal streets of Moscow: three tours have been dedicated to Tverskaya street and two to Leninsky prospekt.
At the moment we are preparing a series of seminars on green areas in Moscow, in particular public parks, their evolution over time in terms of quantity and quality.

In addition to this, we are starting up initiatives on art, linguistics and ancient history. In 2009, for example, we organised the festival of the most ancient cities in Russia, Veliky Novgorod, for its 1150 anniversary. Taking part in the festival were archeologist Valentin Yanin, linguists Andrey Zaliznyak and professor Alexey Gippius: accompanied by the latter, we did a tour called "What lies below", that described events and medieval monuments in one of the most important districts in the city, Lyudin konec, where archeological explorations have not yet been carried out.

In May, for the 140th anniversary of Rome Capital of Italy, MosKultProg™ is launching Velonotte™ Roma: a nocturnal itinerary around the urban and architectural masterpieces with commentary by experts.

Velonotte™ Roma will be a kind of all-night event by bicycle and will tour the streets of the Garbatella, taking in the marbles of the Palazzo del Lavoro and the Palazzo dei Congressi along the modern via Cristoforo Colombo, reconstructing the links in a historical and socio-urbanistic context. These districts feature work by internationally renowned Italian greats such as PierLuigi Nervi, Marcello Piacentini, Giuseppe Pagano, Adalberto Libera and Mario De Renzi, who here have made the most important Italian contribution to the contemporary urban patrimony. Sergey Nikitin

Where: Rome 8 May 2010
Languages: Russian, Italian and English
Participation is free. Registration compulsory on the official website
http://www.velonotte.blogspot.com

Sergey Nikitin (1976), professor of History of Architecture at the Moscow state university RUDN, is founder and curator of Velonotte™ and Moskultprog™. He has recently published in Russian "Walks in Rome" (Moscow 2009), based on research carried out in Roman archives, that deals with the toponymic changes that have taken place in the Italian capital since 1870.

Latest on Architecture

Latest on Domus

Read more
China Germany India Mexico, Central America and Caribbean Sri Lanka Korea icon-camera close icon-comments icon-down-sm icon-download icon-facebook icon-heart icon-heart icon-next-sm icon-next icon-pinterest icon-play icon-plus icon-prev-sm icon-prev Search icon-twitter icon-views icon-instagram