Experience of Construction and Modern Use of Historical Secondary Educational Institutions in Russia and Europe

The creation of a secondary education system has become one of the priority tasks of social policy in the advanced states of the New Age, which is reflected in the search for the most optimal form of organizing the educational process, as well as adequate architectural and planning solutions for the educational space. The article attempts to generalize domestic and foreign experience in designing secondary education facilities in the pre-modern period, mainly on the example of large (including capital) cities, where the specifics of the morphological organization dictated special conditions for design activities. The retrospective nature of the study allows us to trace the progressive movement from the practices of reconstruction and adaptation of existing objects to the creation of specialized architecture that meets the needs of secondary educational institutions and the adopted sanitary and hygienic requirements. In addition, school objects are considered from the point of view of the existing differentiation, which expressed the public demand for boarding schools and "visiting" institutions. In conclusion, brief information is provided on the modern functional use of historical secondary education objects, which allows us to form some preliminary idea of their architectural potential. As a fundamental approach, the article uses the method of retrospective and historical-genetic analysis, which allows us to generalize domestic and foreign experience in the construction of secondary educational institutions in the 19th-20th centuries, and also to subordinate the logic of the presentation of the material to the chronological principle. In the course of the conducted research, symmetrical processes in the development of the architecture of historical gymnasiums in Russia and Germany were traced, it was established that the overwhelming majority of such buildings retained the educational function within their walls and that it is in connection with the considered educational facilities that it seems possible to introduce the concept of a network of urban institutions that form an identical environment of the historical centers of the largest cities.