Benois Villas
St Petersburg University, together with the Representative Office of St Petersburg University in Barcelona, invites you to take part in the online conference "Benois Villas". During the meeting, you will get acquainted with the two-hundred-year history of the largest artistic dynasty in St. Petersburg.
What world famous artistic dynasties do you know? There are not so many of them, one might even say - a few. A special place among them belongs to the Benois family. This genus is of French origin. In Russia, this foreign family became the ancestor of a whole constellation of talented architects, artists, sculptors, composers and artists.
The ancestor of the dynasty and its most prominent representative is Professor of Architecture Nikolai Leontyevich Benois, chief architect of Peterhof and the Imperial Theatres.
The Benois dynasty also includes the brightest representatives of Russian culture, many of whom have gained worldwide fame: Nikolai, Alexander, Albert and Leonty Benois, Zinaida Serebryakova, Nikolai and Evgeny Lansere.
At the end of the 19th century, on the southern coast of the Gulf of Finland, representatives of the artistic and business intelligentsia of St. Petersburg began to buy land for the construction of houses for summer country life. This is how the famous dachas of the Benois family appeared, which until 1917 were part of the Bobylskaya village. After the revolution and nationalization, a sanatorium for educational workers was placed in these amazingly beautiful houses. Wooden dachas survived the war, but by 2019 only a couple of buildings remained from the famous village, which are in disrepair.
Currently, it is planned to restore the remaining houses and use them as the Creative base of the Faculty of Arts of St Petersburg University. The goal of the project is to unite the values and traditions of the famous Peterhof summer residents and give these monuments of architecture with a hundred-year history a new life as an interdisciplinary art residence of St Petersburg University.
The lecture will be held as part of the celebration of the 300th anniversary of the first university in Russia.
The meeting will be held online in Russian with simultaneous translation into Spanish.
Speaker
Author and presenter - Evgenia Petrashen, Member of the Board of the St. Petersburg Union of Architects, Senior Lecturer at the Design Department of St Petersburg University and Chief Architect and co-founder of the Benois Successors Architectural Bureau.