“Both with a Modern Feel and with a Blast from the Past”: Nostalgia in the Projects of Historical Wooden Houses’ Preservation
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.14515/monitoring.2025.5.3027Keywords:
heritage, historical value, wooden houses, museumification, nostalgia, reconstructionAbstract
The paper analyzes projects aimed at the preservation of historical wooden houses and quarters in Russian cities. The authors offer a nuanced approach to preservation initiatives that goes beyond the dichotomy of museumification vs. commercialization. As an analytical tool, they apply T. Bennett’s notion of “working surfaces on the social” that enables tracing how the social and memorial aspects of urban life associated with wooden houses turn into cultural products designed to promote certain policies: from cultivating a “good urbanite” to urban economic development or local patriotism.
Relying on the distinction between nostalgia as mood and nostalgia as mode offered by H. Brembeck and N. Sörum, the authors show how actors engaged in the transformations of buildings work with their historical and commemorative value. Based on 5 cases and 35 interviews with actors involved in the preservation of historical houses in Nizhny Novgorod, Vologda and Totma, the paper shows how wooden houses get “disassembled” and “(re)assembled” in different contexts, and how these processes ― in the course of which the buildings are not only transformed physically but also reinterpreted functionally, while the ends of preservation get articulated, and meanings emerge and get erased ― are mediated by various forms of nostalgia.
Acknowledgments. This research has been supported by the grant from the Russian Science Foundation № 24-28-01093, https://rscf.ru/project/24-28-01093/.
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