От крестьянской усадьбы до придорожного кафе
ENIn recent years, new forms of folk creativity emerged. These forms could be attributed (with some reservation) to folk architecture. The first group of buildings encompasses the renewed and rebuilt former farmsteads for recreational purposes. This phenomenon is a consolidation of memory and peculiar redoubling of highly qualified person's (teacher, engineer, businessman, etc.) working life in the modern urban surroundings and, on the other hand, recreation in "his own" nature, telling about his past, however, not without modern service as well. The second group encompasses buildings and equipment connected with the so called "country tourism". For this purpose, either old houses could be used or new ones built and properly equipped. In the first case, houses are being modernized using modern conveniences. In the other case, the effect of agedness could be given to the new buildings by using traditional forms and materials. Old farmsteads retain more features of authenticity, but in general most objects of the country tourism have a reproduction character. The objects of such designation are usually built in remote places, near lakes, rivers, woods or even in woods. They are little known to the broad sections of the population, that's why we lack estimation and theoretical investigation of this phenomenon. We can find only information of economic or advertising character. The third group encompasses more conspicuous buildings and equipments - wayside inns (the name is conditional, because these objects can be called in different ways - coffee-houses, restaurants, etc.). They usually emerge near highways, crossings, fuel stations, in suburbs, recreation areas. At the beginning there were just small trade stores, garrets.As years passed and the number of traveling people increased, visual attractiveness, especially using the attributes of the past became a significant condition of favorable competitiveness. Many clients perceived this image as a return to the village surroundings, which they knew from their own past or from other people's memories and literature. Part of such buildings had grown to vast complexes. In these complexes we can find brick and wooden buildings (such as former water mills and windmills), which had been standing for many years or newly built of wood and stone. Also many old things, most often agriculture equipment, are collected and presented for exhibition. Outdoors and indoors we can find rows of carts, sledges, and especially vehicles, which sometimes possess a significant charge of decorativeness. We can also see agriculture equipment: intact or broken, rusty scythes, pitchforks, ploughs, engines, even tractors, cars and their parts; kettles, smoothing-irons, candle-sticks, and other manufactured articles of sometimes unknown application. These places become almost like ethnographical museums. Building of round logs, straw and reed roof covering had been revived. Often there are specially designed places for children. There children can even learn to play old Shepard games. These phenomena should be attributed to contemporary forms of folk art evolution with all its variety of positive and negative features. The positive things: old relics find medium of existence there; revived old materials and ways of building have, although limited, but nevertheless an important role of retaining national peculiarity. [...].
