Humanities & Social Sciences 1 (2016 9) 5-40 ~ ~ ~ УДК 7.033:726 New Directions in Russian Orthodox Church Architecture at the beginning of the Twentieth Century William Craft Brumfi eld* Tulane University New Orleans, Louisiana, USA Received 24.10.2015, received in revised form 16.11.2015, accepted 28.12.2015 At the beginning of the 20th century certain infl uential voices in Russian architecture began to question the highly ornamental approach to church design that had reigned during the latter half of the 19th century. <...> In the opinion of these architect-critics, the so-called Ostankinshchina style (named after the late 17th-century Church of the Trinity at Ostankino) seemed to deform the aesthetic purity of medieval Russian church architecture, even as it lessened the spiritual meaning of the church itself. <...> In response, a number of architects, such as Aleksei Shchusev and Vladimir Pokrovskii, explored new paths in church design by combining a study of early medieval Russian forms with new technological methods. <...> Keywords: Russian church architecture, style moderne, “Ostankinshchina”, Abramtsevo, Viktor Vasnetsov, Fedor Shekhtel, Aleksei Shchusev, Vladimir Pokrovskii. <...> Equally a part of the cultural life of the period was an architectural movement known as the “new style,” or the “style moderne,” which played a major role in transforming the built environment of Moscow and Petersburg during the fi nal decades of Imperial Russia. <...> Scholars in both Russia and the West have noted the antecedents of the style moderne in a native arts and crafts tradition, as well as its obvious links to European modernism in the form of art nouveau and the Vienna Secession1 . <...> All rights reserved period there also occurred a renascence in church architecture that combined the plasticity of the new style and its use of advanced construction techniques with a rediscovery of the structural and decorative principles of medieval Russian religious architecture. <...> In fact the primary obstacle to a new interpretation of church architecture arose not from some inherently conservative principle within the design of the medieval Russian church (which had shown itself receptive to strikingly innovative forms * Corresponding author E-mail address: william.brumfi eld@gmail.com # 5 # William Craft Brumfi eld. <...> New Directions in Russian Orthodox Church Architecture at the beginning of the Twentieth… in both wood and masonry during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries <...>