Jewish Contributions to the Architecture of St. Petersburg – Brumfield Collection

The focus of this project is photographs (primarily color images) taken by William Craft Brumfield from 1970 to 2017 in Leningrad/St. Petersburg, the former capital of a vast empire and one of the world’s great cultural centers. The material includes not only major monuments such as palaces, state buildings, cathedrals, churches, synagogues and mosques, but also a street-by-street documentation of buildings within the pre-revolutionary boundaries of the city. This project is devoted specifically to the contributions of Jewish architects and entrepreneurs to the development of St. Petersburg.

The many thousands of photographs in the collection have been scanned in the TIFF format and are all precisely identified (via Photoshop Fileinfo) by address and date of the photograph. This unique precision is possible through a correlation of information stamped on slide mounts with the daily log records that Brumfield has maintained since 1967. The addresses are drawn from research with several Russian sources. This specificity allows a correlation with major cultural topics in architecture and the arts, including literature, music (opera, ballet, symphonic) and the visual arts.

Collections by Jewish Architect

Collections by Jewish Entrepreneur

References

Beizer, M. (1989). The Jews of St. Petersburg: Excursions Through a Noble Past. Jewish Publication Society.

Brumfield, W. C. (1991). The Origins of Modernism in Russian Architecture. University of California Press.

Horowitz, B. (2009). Jewish Philanthropy and Enlightenment in Late-Tsarist Russia. University of Washington Press.

Lukin, V. M. “Еврейскoe Кладбищe” in A. V. Kodak Исторические Кладбища Петербурга (Historical Cemeteries of Petersburg), (St. Petersburg, 1993) pp. 460-465, with diagrams. 

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