A Modern City. Living Realities of History

The article is devoted to the reality of the modern historical city in the totality of the actual values of the valuable heritage, traces of the past, mental codes, archetypal images and the memory of civilization. The place of history in today’s socio-cultural fi eld and in the professional context is not clearly defi ned. Together with the understanding of the need to preserve the heritage, traces and memory of the past, there are global trends that mediate the features of the glocal in architecture. However, even this compromise cannot fully demonstrate the complexity of the historical city viability. According to the author, it is necessary to search for reasons that sometimes appear outside the material reality, but address directly to the spiritual world and mental space of a person, which is the main purpose of the article. The emphasis is placed on the artistic dimension of environmental realities, which allows us to determine the living connections of history and modernity on the basis of the author’s concept of artc integration. The article is illustrated by some results of cooperation between the Nizhny Novgorod State University of Architecture and Civil Engineering and the Polytechnic University of Milan (Politecnico di Milano) in the fi eld of reconstruction and renovation of historically valuable territories and author’s photographs.