The nature energy in Smolensk buildings architecture

Pleached tulip sets in the friezes, grapes bunches at the hanging blades base, shamrocks in round frames, metal fences formed like curving stems and leaves, high gable with difficult, fluid form with oval window and stucco garlands, street facade, topped by vases on stepped pedestals …

«Is this a palace?» — You ask and are surprised if you are told that it is the description of the architectural elements of Smolensk houses, which is typical for the modern style, which you pass every day.

Modern ornament is intended to express, to make tangible job design, internal forces, material, their efforts and dynamics. Here it is the spontaneous motility and vital power, which permeates and spiritualizes architectural form of this style, how strained, overcoming the resistance of the material, grow, make their way through the thick tree flowers and grass on the furniture, how vigorously and rapidly in a vortex motion twisted mass of the grand staircase. Linear or relief ornamentation – is infinitely varied in forms, elastic or withered, flowing, smooth and fluid. Objects or buildings, made in modern style, have a quality of living, developing organism, ambivalent by its nature, which has the growth power, biological and spiritual life. Billowing, swaying mass, rapid and smooth movement of organic forms, transparent and light rhythms of linear ornamentation, iron poles and grids are moving from building to building, from the material to the material — from wood to iron, from stone to plaster, from plaster to marble, from volumetric forms to ornamental and back.
Modern can be characterized by the words of the French art critic Charles Blanc: «… the architecture in the highest sense of the word — this is not the building, which is decorated, it is the decoration, which is being built.»
Among the buildings in the city of Smolensk, significant for modernity, also can be noted cultural heritage located on the B. Sovetskaya Street, h.20 and h. 22, Lenin Street, h.10 and h. 14, Dzerzhinsky Street, h.11, K. Marx Street, h.14.