Muted histories and reunited memories: neglected Swedish architectural heritage in St. Petersburg

CBEES Advanced Seminar with Irina Seits, Postdoctoral Researcher in Aesthetics, Södertörn University

Speaker: Irina Seits, Postdoctoral Researcher in Aesthetics, Södertörn University, CBEES

Abstract:
This postdoctoral project, financed by the Foundation for Baltic and East European Studies (Östersjöstiftelsen), started in January 2020. During the seminar, as the project enters its finalizing stage, the work that has been done in the past two years will be reviewed with an aim to discuss the possible ways to further develop the project’s main theme – the shared Swedish-Russian heritage and the strategies of its preservation in the Baltic region.
The project focuses on the Swedish urban heritage that remains in St. Petersburg in neglected and dilapidated state. This applies primarily to industrial architecture and workers’ settlements in St. Petersburg that were built for the Swedish corporations, for example, factories, office buildings, and residential complexes of the mechanical plant “Ludvig Nobel.” Despite their utilitarian nature, these industrial and housing ensembles serve as vivid examples of Northern Modern and proto-functionalist architecture, resembling early experiments with rational organisation of the working spaces inside factory workshops on one hand and introducing innovative solutions for workers’ housing on the other.
Throughout the Soviet period, these industrial sites built by foreign entrepreneurs, had been introduced neither to the academic/architectural community nor to the public as artistically, historically, or culturally valuable heritage. This has led to a critical current state of these objects and to the lack of general knowledge about the long history of cooperation between Sweden and Russia, which developed in various areas of economic and cultural life in the region before the Revolution.
During the seminar the articles that have been published as part of the project will be reviewed to address its main research questions. The challenges that stood in the way of the project’s realisation will be reflected upon along with the outline of the new networks and possibilities that opened up in the past two years. Any critical comments on the completed work and reflections on the further possible development of this topic are warmly welcomed during an open discussion.

About the speaker:
Irina Seits is a postdoctoral researcher at the department of Aesthetics, Södertörn University. She gained her PhD in aesthetics from Södertörn in 2018 with the thesis “Architectures of Life Building in the Twentieth Century: Russia, Germany, Sweden.” Irina Seits has MA degrees in History of Fine Arts from St. Petersburg State University (2006) and European University in St. Petersburg (2008). Her interests include the architectural and urban theory of modernism, the cultural heritage preservation, and the aesthetics of the everyday.

Join the seminar on campus: MA 796

Or via ZOOM:
https://sh-se.zoom.us/j/69173593607?pwd=Q0xUbVlmUzVhT1RpTlpGQ2hjWjBVQT09
Meeting ID: 691 7359 3607
Passcode: 474241