Gamaliia K. The Informative Potential of the Architectural-Urban Canon in the Incipience of the Culture of the Urban Space

This dissertation clarifies the specifics of formation in the urban culture of the Ancient World and the early Middle Ages of the constantly changing material and artistic phenomena, which can be explained using the fundamental art-critics concept “Architectural-Urban Canon”. We view the concept and characteristics of the Architectural-Urban Canon in the wide time-space range of artistic culture from the ancient time to the Middle Ages. The canon is defined as a relatively stable materially organized sum of architectural and urban forms that are able to change and adapt. In this sense, an archaic city can be seen as a spatial model of an artistic world picture, able to accumulate, store and communicate information about itself and its history. The attention is paid not only to the role of fine arts and architecture in the formation of the cultural and historical reality of the ancient and early medieval cities, but also to the analysis of city’s spatial existence as a whole. For the first time ever the art analysis of the urban environment includes the study of characteristics of the landscape park as a part of the Architectural-Urban Canon; and the concept of the “garden-city” is seen as a refuge from the urbanization and the ecological crisis. It is explained that the model of canon of city (and garden) is based not on the differences of their individual urban structures, but on their proximity and unity; and while they differ in the variety of their functions, they are similar in the nature of their influence on a person.