From Forest to Steppe: The Russian Art of Building in Wood

Throughout Russian history, local craftsmen have shown remarkable skill in fashioning wood into items of daily use, from bridges and street paving to carts and boats to household utensils and combs. Russia has the largest forested zone on the planet, so its architecture was also traditionally made from timber. From homes to churches to forts, Russian buildings are almost all, underneath, constructed with logs, often covered by plank siding or by lathing and plaster.
In From Forest to Steppe, renowned scholar and photographer William Craft Brumfield offers a panoramic survey of Russia's centuries-long heritage of wooden architecture. Lavishly illustrated with more than 400 color photographs, the volume links log-built barns, windmills, houses, and churches in the Far North; Buddhist shrines in the Transbaikal region; and eighteenth-century palaces on the outskirts of Moscow. Brumfield also takes readers to the estate houses of many Russian literary giants, from Chekhov and Tolstoy to Dostoevsky and Pushkin. Spanning thousands of photographed sites, five decades of field work, and seven time zones, Brumfield's photographs offer compelling evidence of the adaptability of log construction and its ability to transcend class, cultural, and aesthetic boundaries.
In the decades since Brumfield began photographing Russian architecture, many of the buildings he has documented have been demolished or abandoned and left to rot at alarming rates. Brumfield observes a contradiction in contemporary Russia: It acknowledges the cultural importance of wooden buildings yet struggles to find and dedicate the resources and solutions needed to save them. A hymn and elegy to the long Russian practice of building with wood, From Forest to Steppe is an unparalleled look into one of the world's most singular architectural traditions.

Author: William Craft Brumfield
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 07/01/2025
Pages: 440
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 4.80lbs
Size: 12.20h x 9.10w x 1.30d
ISBN: 9781478028246

About the Author
William Craft Brumfield is Professor of Slavic Studies at Tulane University. Brumfield began photographing Russia in 1970 and is the foremost authority in the West on Russian architecture. He is the author, editor, and photographer of numerous books, including Journeys Through the Russian Empire: The Photographic Legacy of Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky, Architecture at the End of the Earth: Photographing the Russian North, and Lost Russia: Photographing the Ruins of Russian Architecture, all published by Duke University Press. Brumfield is the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship and was a Fellow at the National Humanities Center. In 2002 he was elected to the state Russian Academy of Architecture and Construction Sciences and in 2006 to the Russian Academy of Fine Arts. He is also the 2014 recipient of the D. S. Likhachev Prize for Outstanding Contributions to the Preservation of the Cultural Heritage of Russia. In 2019 he was awarded the Russian state's Order of Friendship medal--the highest decoration of the Russian Federation given to foreign nationals--for his study and promotion of Russia's cultural legacy. Brumfield's photographs of Russian architecture have been exhibited at numerous galleries and museums and are part of the Image Collections at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.