THE MUSEUM OF ARCHITECTURE OF THE ALL-UKRAINIAN MUSEUM TOWN

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The article deals with the history of the Museum (Stock) of Architecture (a department of Ancient Ukrainian Construction Technologies) of the State Historical and Cultural Preserve «All-Ukrainian Museum Town», which existed on the territory of the nationalized Kyiv-Pechersk monastery since 1926. The idea of creating an architectural department of the Lavra Museum probably appeared in the first half of the 1920s. Since 1926, Ipolyt Morhilevskyi, an art and architectural historian, was heading the Museum of Architecture. In the late 1920s, the Museum of Architecture received separate premises (the building № 30). At the end of 1929, Stefan Taranushenko outlined in a position paper the basic principles of the Ukrainian Architectural Museum, which had to cover all phenomena of the architectural process in Ukraine from ancient times to the present day. It was suggested to display «architecture in originals» (monuments and fragments), drawings, models, documents, photographs, movies, diagrams, drafts, maps, etc. In the early 1930s, the materials of Prof. Ipolyt Morhilevskyi’s and Prof. Stefan Taranushenko’s research expeditions on masonry and wooden monumental architecture in Ukraine were an important part of the museum collection. A series of photos and entries in inventory allow reconstruction and visualization of information about the Museum of Architecture. There were installed horizontal flat showcases in the museum exhibition hall, and boards with photographs and drawings were mounted over them. There were illustrative materials hanging on the walls, in particular samples of home paintings, decorative paintings of churches and synagogues, photos of interiors and exteriors, dimensional drawings, and plans of different types of buildings. The Museum of Architecture did not exist for a long time, primarily because of the changes in the structure and activity of the All‑Ukrainian Museum Town, caused by the aggressive Sovietization and ideologizing of museum work in the early 1930s. The exposition of the Museum (Stock) of Architecture of the All-Ukrainian Museum Town was dismantled no later than 1934. Key words: history of museums, museum iconography, Museum of Architecture, All‑Ukrainian Museum Town, Kyiv, UkrSSR, 1920–1930s