Еркерната архитектоника в традиционния балкански град. Към друг прочит на „възрожденския стил”
A Different Interpretation of the ‘Revival Style’

Summary/Abstract: If we go back to a realistic, narrow understanding of the Revival Period (only as a process of national identification and organizing) this would liberate the history of architecture from the overall conceptual frame about the ‘Revival epoch’, and the historian of architecture from the need to reinvent identity. The text changes the academic status of the ‘house from the Revival period’ turning it into a disputed subject of research. Placed in a wider context and examined in a comparative aspect, the professional (trade-craftsmen) residential architecture could be described professionally in the most general terms with one word - bow window (analogous to the Hellenistic orderly architecture and the Ancient Roman arch architecture). The apparent quality change in the outlook of the Balkan trade-craftsmen centers of the 18-19th century can be defined by the widely used traditional style of the bow window fashion in construction practice. In different versions, combinations and articulations the bow window volumes and bulging, symmetrical and asymmetrical, form the representative façade compositions also in the Asia Minor city centers. ‘The bow window’ architectonics, traditional for the world of the middle ages – Christian and Muslim, became an inseparable part of the construction culture, later developed in the Late Ottoman period and forming a specific city glass-case which carried the characteristics of the prolonged, late Mediaeval period with underlined oriental flavor.

• Details
• Contents