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Alexander Rappaport biography
Alexander Rappaport is an architecture theorist and historian, philosopher of art, writer, blogger and artist. Born in 1941, he lived in Kazakhstan, St. Petersburg, Moscow, London and for the past twenty years in the remote seaside village of Mazirbe in Latvia.
Alexander Rappaport is best known for his prolific work in the field of architecture theory and criticism – he has written several thousand texts. His writing touches the fundamental problems in architectural history and professional thinking, broadening into art history, philosophy and cultural theory.
Rappaport comes from an artistic and cinematic family. His father was a renowned film director Herbert Rappaport, an Austrian Jew who came to the Soviet Union to build his career in the Lenfilm studios, here he met Lydia Schildknekht a costume and set designer, coming from a line of artists and architects (her father, Rappaport’s grandfather was also a film art director who fled the Soviet Union to work in European cinema among his films are L’Age d’Or and Un Chien Andalou with Dalí and Buñuel).
Rappaport was born in 1941 in dramatic circumstances: his family was being evacuated to Almaty, Kazakhstan from the besieged city of Leningrad during WW2, his mother went into labour on the train – marking his accidental birthplace the city of Vologda in Russia. The family returned to St. Petersburg after the war in 1946. Rappaport’s beloved grandmother Lydia Schildknekht and his uncle Viktor Schildknekht moved to Riga after the war, Viktor being a cinema artist and set designer who helped set up the Riga Film Studios. Alexander’s childhood summers spent in Jurmala formed his strong connection to Latvia as the happiest place in his life.
In Leningrad Rappaport enrolled in Through his parents Rappaport was initially introduced to some of the intellectual and artistic circles, including In Leningrad Rappaport enrolled in the Architectural Institute (LISI), apart from his university friends he also communicated with artistic and intellectual circles, the family of Anna Akhmatova, Faina Ranevskaya, the poet Joseph Brodsky who was to leave a lifelong impression. On a trip to Georgia where he studied drawing under Vasily Shukhaev and lived at the house of Elene Akhvlediani.
Rappaport moved to Moscow in the early 1970s where he continued to work and write, here he became involved with the renowned philosopher Georgy Petrovitch Shedrovitsky and his Moscow Methodological Circle. This membership was a large chapter of Rappaport’s life, lasting almost a decade.
In 1991 Rappaport moves to London, with his wife, artist Nataia Arendt and their 4-year-old daughter, to start a new life there upon the invitation of the BBC as a radio correspondent.
In 2004 Rappaport once again makes a drastic move, abandoning London and choosing to settle in the remote village of Mazirbe, on the unpopulous Livonian coast, he buys an old house in the midst of a dense pine forest where he lives alone, playing the piano, painting and writing his blog – his main focus for the last 20 years.
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