ARCHITECTURE OF THE EUROPEAN MIDDLE AGES IN THE CONTEXT OF CULTURE

The aim of the article is to substantiate the determinative influence of the sociocultural context of the Middle Ages on the formation of medieval architecture, i.e. evidence that the sociocultural context, woven from the mental dominants of the Western European Middle Ages, aesthetic representations and scholastic constructions determines architectural intentions in a given cultural era. The material of cultural research in this work are the diverse phenomena of medieval culture: scholastic research, philosophical-aesthetic concepts, facts of architectural activity. The conclusion about the determinacy of the architectural activity of the sociocultural context is based on the methodology of reconstruction of the cultural-historical reality, based on the representation of culture as a coexistence of integral cultural-historical types, cultural eras, in which each element is an actualization of the system of mental dominants and the methodology of typology, which allows to identify the main types of sociocultural dominants, to build their hierarchy. During the research, the following types of sociocultural foundations of the architectural and construction activities of the Western European Middle Ages were identified: ontological, aesthetic and scholastic foundations. The ontological context is the unity of the mental dominants of medieval culture (dogmatism, universalism, symbolism and extreme dualism). The existential principles of medieval culture set the image of the beautiful as immaterial, radiant, luminous, harmonious, complete. The medieval scholasticism clarifies ideas about harmony and order, substantiates symbolism as the norm of thinking and activity. The dominant role is played by the principles of early and high scholasticism: keeping and harmony, which initiates the principle of hierarchy in the architecture of the Gothic cathedral, disputation, embodied in the legitimacy of discrepancies and finding harmony between the disagree, harmony of the consistency of parts in architecture. Thus, the sociocultural context of the Middle Ages is a hierarchical system, the basic level of which is the mental core of a given cultural epoch, which consistently determines the specifics of aesthetic concepts and scholastic constructions that are actualized in medieval architecture. This determination is meaningful, because architectural phenomena (Romanik, Gothic), individual elements (stained-glass windows, arc-buds, ribs, buttresses, rosewindows, etc.) are embodiments of the sociocultural context, and genetic, as architecturalartistic images are born from an artistic interpretation of sociocultural discourse, represented by the concepts of dogmatism, symbolism, luminescence, radiance, harmony and order, such as subordination and agreement, etc.