Articles

The Siberian City of Omsk will celebrate its 296^th Anniversary in 2012. A former small merchant town has turned into a large industrial, scientific and cultural centre of West Siberia.

The city’s history of welfare standarts and culture has a particular effect on its characteristics and spirit. The lives and fates of such eminent people of the country as F. Dostoevsky and M. Vrubel, L. Martinov, V. Kuibishev and D. Karbishev and other prominent figures in science and art are closely connected with Omsk.

A number of constructions erected in different epochs but in concord within also add the originality of the city. Some of the buildings are rightly considered as monuments of architecture.

The panorama of Omsk in its architectural meaning is stylistically varied. It os the fortress where the earliest examples can be found. Who might even imagine a pattern in Baroque to exist in Omsk? But to be true, this pattern is impretentious being not a palace but a building for its particular military purpose kept till nowadays.

The austere style of Classicism came up to take a place of the elaborate style in Baroque. The building of the Siberian Cadet Military College (The Frunze Common to all arms Military School now) proves it. One can find its form of design stylistically repeated in the Nikolsky Cathedral.

By the year of 1905 the high street of old Omsk – Lyubinsky Prospect (avenue) had been finally formed. No doubt, the leading role of its architectural complex belonged to the Moscow rows of stalls. Various Russian manufactory Jointstock Companies (including P. Ryabushkin, S. Morozov, the Nosovs) accomodated their goods for wholesale trade there.

The edifice of the Drama Theatre was maintained in the traditions of Russian theatre buidling. The famous Paris Grand Opera had served as a prototype for a great number of theatre buildings in Russia. The Omsk Drama Theatre was among them. In ten years the edifice was topped by the statue of a “Winged Genius”(sculptor V. Vinkler). The Czech sculptor happened to be in Omsk among the prisoners of war in 1915.

In 1911 the famous West Siberian agricultural and industrial exhibition was organized in Omsk. The novelty and originality of the form of its pavilions in the Modernist style had rather a great influence upon the buildings practice of the town. The principles and forms of the Modern were also reflected in wooden architecture. The best indicative example of that is the House of the Kuznetsky Coalmines Stockholder Company. Art critics use to call the House erected in the 1910s “the ABC of the Modernist style”.

There is a special attractiveness in old Omsk red brick mansions with their ornament lattices of the gates, fences, corbel over the main entrance.

Old Omsk looked as if it had turned away from the Irtysh river. Backyards, warehouses, factories occupied the banks. The town planners of the new Omsk set themselves the task of turning streets and squares, parks and gardens to face the river. The Irtysh oaf nowadays becomes the main axis of the composition around which the city is developing ang growing.

The panorama of the city enriched by some new big projects of the last decades.We wish our city’s environment to be more humane, style and modern.