Posts Tagged Russia
The designer skin he lives in: is it time to bury Lenin’s stage-managed show?
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on January 9, 2012
Young Russians no longer pay homage to him, but the Bolshevik leader 'lives on' in a carefully choreographed show of solemnity inside a Moscow mausoleum. But for how long?
In Moscow at this time every year the debate resumes about what to do with Lenin's body, which, contrary to the Bolshevik's wishes to be buried next to his mother, has lain in state in Red Square since his death on 21 January 1924. Last year, Prime Minister Putin held an online poll in which 70% of participants felt his body should be buried. That result yielded no decision either way (no doubt because it was not the one Putin had hoped for). Nevertheless, when I found myself in Moscow just before Christmas, I seized the opportunity to pay Lenin a visit while I still could. What I encountered was part reliquary, part freak show – and an impressive work of experience design, as stage-managed as anything in the London Dungeon.
The experience begins with a procession along the wall of the Kremlin from a set of metal detectors at the very entrance to Red Square. In Soviet times, a 100m-long queue was a permanent fixture. Today, the queue has disappeared but its infrastructure – a chain cordon – remains, as I discovered the hard way. Not seeing the way in, I stepped over the chain and soon met with a policewoman charging at me and blowing her whistle. Finally inside the mausoleum (having been sent back to the top of Red Square) I was respectfully stomping the snow off my shoes when I was violently shushed by a guard. All of this is part of the choreographed solemnity that includes the prohibition of hats, cameras, talking, hands in pockets and lingering. Because, despite the morbid voyeurism of wanting to see the body of a man who died 88 years ago, this is not a freak show; it's a piece of political theatre.
The mausoleum itself was designed by Alexey Shchusev in 1929 to replace a temporary wooden one he'd erected within days of Lenin's death. Made of marble and granite, it is a series of concentric cubes resembling a step pyramid. Shchusev shared the suprematist Kazimir Malevich's belief that the cube symbolised eternity. Since his masters, known as "the immortalisation commission", were using the latest technology to make Lenin last forever, his tomb was to be a kind of Mecca. And not withstanding the irony of a secular political system creating its own saint, there is something of Mecca about it, processing around the body the way Muslim pilgrims process around the cuboid Ka'aba.
Or at least there should be. But I found myself alone inside the chamber – alone, that is, except for two guards and Lenin himself – and not so much processing as gawping. It is one of the most impressive rooms I've ever entered, though this is only partly down to the architecture. The black granite floor and walls, with their red marble lightning motif, communicate such density you feel like you're at the heart of a mountain. But most of the impact comes from what is inside this container: the bizarre sight of this embalmed body lying there like a bald Snow White in a black double-breasted suit and polka-dot tie.
The atmosphere is one of incredulity. Is that waxy thing Lenin at all, and if it is, how is he in such good condition? Only a blackened fingernail hints at the deterioration of an actual body. As to whether he is real or fake, the answer is of course both. For as solid as the architecture is, it is merely a stage set. The real architecture of this would-be religious experience is the framework of chemicals that keeps Lenin's skin firm. The scaffolding in the cells of his face is a solution made up of potassium acetate, glycerol and alcohol, in which he is routinely bathed. All that marble and granite is merely compensating for the frailty of Lenin's mortal body.
Similarly, whatever the atmosphere in the chamber, the only thing that matters is inside the glass sarcophagus. Designed by Nikolai Tomsky, the purveyor of socialist realist statues to public squares across the Soviet Union, it echoes the ziggurat shape of the tomb. But more importantly, it conceals the machinery that regulates the climate around the body to 16 degrees and 80% humidity – just as in a shopping mall, the air conditioning is more important than the architecture.
The same team that looks after Lenin has reportedly been embalming North Korea's Kim Jong-il, continuing a fine communist tradition that has included Stalin (briefly), Mao and Ho Chi Minh. The motives of the communist ideologues in preserving Lenin as their prophet in perpetuity are clear. What this pickled body has to do with modern Russia is less so. The younger generation no longer pays homage to it. Boris Yeltsin wanted to bury it, but Putin had no wish to dispose of this pseudo-religious relic. In fact, just as he has sanctioned the continued fortifying of Lenin's skin, Putin has created his own cult of the body. He has made a show of his judo skills and posed topless for the cameras. In contrast to the semi-real Lenin, Putin is the "muzhik", or the "real" man. But is he? Rumours abound that Putin's expressionless face and smooth skin are down to Botox and plastic surgery. It's almost as though the more outmoded a politician becomes, the more artifice is required to keep him fresh.
Building the Revolution: Soviet Art and Architecture 1915-1935 – review
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on October 29, 2011
Royal Academy, London
In the courtyard of the Royal Academy stands a spiral tower, dynamic and asymmetric, telescoping out of itself like a cannon in the moment before recoil, with a diagonal line thrusting from top to bottom. Close inspection reveals tiny human figures added to give it scale: this is a 1:40 model of something which, if built, would have been 400m high. Inside the academy a photomontage shows what its effect would have been on its intended location of St Petersburg. It would have overwhelmed the low-lying city of Peter the Great, like the colossal figure of a worker sometimes used to represent Bolshevism in revolutionary posters. It is a thing of all scales and none, echoing both Bruegel's Babel and bottles in the still lifes that its artist-architect creator liked to paint.
The model is of Vladimir Tatlin's Monument to the Third International, of 1920, a celebration of communism that was intended to outdo the Eiffel Tower but also include huge, crystalline slowly moving blocks hung within its frame, which would house lecture halls, conference rooms and a media centre. It is one of the most famous unbuilt projects in architectural history, an emblem of the fervid decade that followed the Russian Revolution.
There is obvious irony that this project for the affirmation of the new should now be appearing, like a captured rhinoceros in a doge's menagerie, in an institution with both "royal" and "academy" in its name.
It announces two exhibitions inside. There is a small one about the tower, and a larger one, Building the Revolution, which focuses on the structures of the time that were actually built, such as workers' clubs, communal housing, an industrialised bakery, a bus garage, headquarters for Izvestia and other organs of propaganda, and bureaucratic cities for the new administration. There is the Shabolovka radio tower in Moscow of 1922, the nearest thing to Tatlin's fantasy actually realised. A tall, tapering cone of steel lattice, it combines creative freedom with a practical function which it is still performing.
The Narkomfin development is there, an experiment in communal housing that resembled a machine-age monastery, now rotted by Russian winters to almost total ruin. Konstantin Melnikov, who eventually proved too brilliantly individual for the regime, is represented by his Rusakov workers' clubs, his own house, and his Gosplan garage. The latter, dominated by a large disc in its elevation, draws on visionary designs from the French revolutionary era, while also evoking the wheels and radiators of motor vehicles. It was a time when Russian architects were realising the dreams of modernism more fully than anyone else, but also felt free to plunder and recombine ideas from the past.
The buildings are represented by two kinds of photograph. One is the big images of the architectural photographer Richard Pare, taken since the fall of communism, radiant but also unsparing in their depiction of the decay that has befallen almost all of them. The other kind are small monochrome images from the 600,000 in the Schusev State Museum of Architecture's archive in Moscow, still attached to the standard forms with which they were filed. Through a brown fog of ageing photographic chemicals you can make out the structures when still new and raw. You are offered a choice of new images of decayed buildings or old images of new buildings. The new-new is not available. The show is prophecy and elegy at once.
The photographs are supported by works of art, mostly drawings and paintings, from the same period, from the Costakis Collection in Thessaloniki, by the likes of El Lissitzky, Liubov Popova, Rodchenko and Malevich. They make the point that architecture and art were closely linked. Architects such as Tatlin were often also artists, while artists produced works whose abstract geometry aspired to resemble buildings. The revolution was not only to be achieved – it also had to be symbolised. The crane would be a tool for magnifying the motions of an artist's hand to an immense scale.
It is a strange idea, both arrogant and naive, that compositions in oil paint might shape cities, and the results could be oxymoronic. Factories were also works of art. Instruments of the collective were also monuments of a single artist's vision. Images of mass production were hand-crafted in studios, and a striking feature of this exhibition is the tactility of the artworks and the basic construction, often in timber, of the buildings. Creative freedom and the dictatorship of the proletariat were joined in a way that could not last.
The exhibition ends with a gloomy room showing Lenin's mausoleum. Its architect, Aleksei Shchusev, was willing to bend with the political wind and so produced an effective symbol of a dubious concept. If the near-deification of Lenin was a corruption of revolutionary principles, the brooding mass of his tomb turned away from the dynamic spirit of the 1920s. In a few years Stalin would, in order to create "art as stunningly simple as the heroism we find today in the Soviet Union", crush this spirit completely under the weight of the classicising style called socialist realism.
As either prophecy or politics, the architecture on show at the Royal Academy largely fails. It served an ideal of communism that fatally ignored its reality. The modern progeny of Tatlin's tower includes the Okhta Centre, a proposed tower for the Russian oil giant Gazprom of similar height – 400m – which, until its planned location was moved, would have had a comparable impact on St Petersburg. Yet this crude pinnacle has none of Tatlin's imaginative brilliance, and celebrates gangster capitalism rather than revolution. Meanwhile, big metal thingies have become a cliche of wannabe cities and expo sites and Anish Kapoor is making another contribution to this pointless genre with his Orbit tower on the London Olympic site. Ninety years after Tatlin it is still in his shadow.
Those buildings that were built are now the subjects of heroic preservation campaigns which stress their value as artworks over their social intent. There was talk, pre-crash, of making Narkomfin into a boutique hotel, and the Red Banner textile factory in St Petersburg may become a cultural centre. And the buildings and paintings of the 1920s are presented to the Academy's bourgeois crowds as an interesting alternative to Degas' ballet dancers.
As art the buildings are indeed wonderful, and for this reason alone the preservation campaigns deserve every success. Whatever attention can be drawn to these works, as the RA is doing, is welcome. Their creators' lack of political realism is also a saving grace, as it makes distance between them and the monstrosities of Soviet government. But their effect is not just as romantic divertissements, and it would not be the same if the architects had put their skills into villas for industrialists as their contemporaries did in Paris and Vienna. They carry the idea that art and design can have a social purpose, which the best of them, such as Melnikov's clubs, actually achieved
Eastern blocks: Soviet architecture on display – in pictures
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on October 28, 2011
A new exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts will examine Russian avant-garde architecture built from 1922 to 1935 and inspired by constructivist art
Constructive criticism: the week in architecture
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on July 15, 2011
Yuri Gagarin touches down in Britain, the Gherkin paternity battle finally ends, and typhoons strike Zaha Hadid's Guangzhou Opera House
Made from an alloy used in rockets, a statue of Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, was unveiled outside the British Council in London this week. Elena Gagarina, daughter of the Russian cosmonaut, did the honours. The casting of the sculpture, a recreation of an original made in 1984, was supervised by the architect Pavel Medvedev, whose statue of Laika the space dog, the first animal to orbit Earth, was erected in Moscow three years ago. Laika died up there.
The Gagarin sculpture is not just a memorial to a brave pioneer. It is also a reminder of a fabulous idea – the notion that space-race technology, both Soviet and American, would transform buildings, everyday goods and machinery, and ways of life. However, although Gagarin's 1961 leap into the unknown did advance design, hopes for a space-age future were nothing new. Science-fiction books, comics and films predate rocket flight, after all.
The space-age look found its way into Soviet buildings of the 1960s and 70s. Meanwhile, much of Britain's futuristic architecture of recent years – the "high-tech " movement championed by Norman Foster and Richard Rogers – has been underpinned by a delight in the sort of space-age design that surfaced when Gagarin made world headlines 50 years ago. Foster's 2004 "Gherkin" is a very modern building that also just happens to look like an old-fashioned space rocket.
Arguments over the authorship of the Gherkin appear to have come an end this week with Ken Shuttleworth of Make architects insisting it was a team effort. In countless articles since 2003, when Shuttleworth left Foster and Partners to set up his own practice, he's been credited as the designer of the London tower. "It's the desire for a figurehead or a single name attached to an individual building that still causes problems," says a spokesperson for Foster and Partners. "Norman has always insisted that his greatest creation is the team around him, and the Gherkin was – once and for all – very definitely designed by a team." Got that everyone?
The idea of a "future memory" in architecture, so dear to Foster, is to be debated in a specially commissioned pavilion for the 2011 Singapore ArchiFest in October. Asif Khan, a young London architect whose work also includes craft, furniture and product design, has been commissioned to create the Future Memory Pavilion on behalf of the British Council, in partnership with the Royal Academy of Arts and the Preservation of Monuments Board, Singapore.
Khan's sketch reveals an elemental design made of ice and sand that will morph during the course of the festival. It captures the spirit of a fascinating line of architectural enquiry, and a contradiction inherent to futuristic design: no matter how apparently innovative they are, buildings retain powerful memories of past. Even as architects try to construct the future, it slips away and becomes the past – just as Khan's pavilion will slowly dissolve back into the Earth and a state of timelessness.
Zaha Hadid's futuristic buildings, such as the flamboyant new Guangzhou Opera House, are as informed by her love of 1920s Russian constructivism as they are with the future. Sadly, the opera house has been in the news this week because of reports that it's already heading the way of Khan's pavilion and falling to bits.
Simon Yu, project architect of the opera house, called me from China. "I've just been to inspect the building. It's typhoon season and its been pouring with rain, but rain isn't 'seeping relentlessly into the building' as has been reported. Glass panels haven't fallen from windows and no large cracks have appeared. I'm not sure what all this is about. Yes, there's still a lot of snagging to be done; we've demanded a high standard of work from what is often seasonal labour, but the flaws are superficial."
Gas holders, meanwhile, were among the most futuristic structures of the 19th century. If the Victorians had invented space rockets, they would have lifted off from structures like these. Some of the most elegant, including Hornsey No 1 in London (described by English Heritage as "probably the world's first geodesic design"), remain under threat. "This is not just any gas holder," says Heloise Brown, conservation adviser for the Victorian Society. "Hornsey No 1 will soon be the last surviving example of a highly innovative design and it must not be lost." Sadly this particular gas holder, designed by Samuel Cutler, is not listed and may be demolished soon.
Gas, in the form of air, will be used to inflate the giant bags that will hopefully save the stepped pyramid of Djoser at Saqqara, near Cairo, from collapse. Cintec, the international engineering firm based in Newport, Wales, has revealed a plan to prop up the central chamber with inflated bags and anchors. Damaged by an earthquake in 1992, this 4,700-year-old structure is the world's first large-scale stone monument. Its revolutionary design was the work of the very first architect we know by name, Imhotep. Because of his visionary work, Imhotep took one giant leap way before Gagarin: he became a god.
St Basil’s Cathedral: Russia’s faulty towers?
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on July 12, 2011
As the Red Square icon turns 450, let's join the Google doodle and celebrate the crazy architecture of this comical creation
Happy 450th birthday to Russia's national symbol, St Basil's Cathedral in Red Square – and it's a good time to step back and consider what a fantastically, psychedelically bizarre symbol it is. That's not a cathedral, it's a fairytale palace made of sweets! It's a stage set for The Nutcracker!
It was particularly hilarious during the cold war. There was Khrushchev or Brezhnev gazing on sternly from a Kremlin balcony at the synchronised marching and Soviet military hardware scrolling past below, but the whole deadly solemn communist pomp was undercut by that garish chunk of Disneyland architecture sitting in the corner, screaming "yoo hoo!". St Basil's was like a clown's nose on the face of the evil empire.
No wonder Stalin wanted to destroy it. He succeeded with other Moscow churches, such as the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, which was rebuilt in 1990, but his order to demolish St Basil's was fortunately thwarted by a conservation architect named Pyotr Baranovsky. According to the legend, Baranovsky sent Stalin a telegram saying he would rather kill himself. He got five years in the gulag for his troubles. St Basil's also offended Napoleon's architectural sensibilities a century earlier. Having stabled his horses in it, he then tried to dynamite it on his way out of Russia, but rain put out the fuses.
Was it St Basil's symbolic power that led to its persecution, or simply its comedy aesthetics? Even without the garish candy colour scheme (it was originally white), it's an odd-looking pile-up of onion domes, polygonal towers, blank arches and sharp spires and extremes of architectural vocabulary. Little is known about its architect, Postnik Yakovlev. Perhaps he was a children's entertainer whom Ivan the Terrible enlisted in a rare moment of levity. Ivan's predecessor, Ivan III, had imported an Italian Renaissance architect, Aristotele Fioravanti, to design his Cathedral of the Dormition at the Kremlin (not that it really shows), but historians have scrabbled around to find a precedent for St Basil's.
Despite appearances, St Basil's is actually pretty orderly, especially if you look at it on plan. It is one central church surrounded by a symmetrical star of eight chapels, four major and four minor, aligned to the points of the compass. What ruins the order is the irregular shape of the central church, and the addition of a ninth chapel, built for St Basil himself – a holy fool who apparently wore no clothes and championed the poor. Ivan the Terrible allegedly carried his coffin.
It is a religious building, after all. It is said to have been inspired by Jerusalem, both the abstract and the literal. Perhaps it was a sort of optical illusion of "the kingdom of heaven", the post-apocalypse New Jerusalem described in the Book of Revelation as well as an approximation of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, according to travellers' accounts. Either that, or someone put something in the architect's unleavened bread.
The Christian significance is all but lost today. St Basil's is now a building that belongs inside snow globes, on T-shirts, commemorative plates, and in Hollywood spy movies as a quick signifier of "Moscow". Perhaps its garishness fits better with today's oligarch-stuffed, ostentatious Russia than it has done with previous eras. Could it have influenced the likes of Gaudi, or even Gehry? Whichever way you look at it, take a good look at it: St Basil's is the craziest national monument around.
Paris skyline to be remodelled by Russian Orthodox church
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on March 19, 2011
Cathedral with five onion domes to be erected next to Eiffel Tower will include cultural centre and public garden
It is one of the most recognisable skylines in the world, featuring one of the most famous monuments.
On the banks of the river Seine, Gustave Eiffel's iron tower, the symbol of France, juts high above the 19th-century Haussmann buildings and the trees of the Champ de Mars park that surround it.
But all this is about to change if the Russians have their way.
Moscow has unveiled plans to build a large Orthodox cathedral complete with five golden onion domes next to the Eiffel Tower. The building on the sought-after site will include a cultural centre and public garden, and was agreed directly by the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, and his Russian counterpart, Dmitri Medvedev.
Architects' drawings show the domes sitting on an undulating roof of glass panels, with the tower in the background.
At 27 metres from the top of the highest dome to the ground, the cathedral is unlikely to detract from a structure that rises to 324 metres. City authorities say they will need to be sure it "fits into its surroundings and is built to last" before giving their approval for the building.
The winning design was unveiled on Friday after an international competition won by a Franco-Russian company.
When Moscow bought the site, formerly the HQ of the French weather service, last year, it was a diplomatic coup as at least two other countries were vying for the land. However, Le Nouvel Observateur magazine reported French concerns that it could be used as a front for spying as it is near a diplomatic complex.
Russian officials in Paris said work on the project was planned to start in 2012 and was likely to cost about €34.5m (£30.1m). Moscow has already paid around £60 million for the site.
"We wanted to find a combination of Orthodox tradition and contemporary architecture to stand out in the heart of Paris," said a spokesman for the church.
Architects compete to design palace of culture for Roman Abramovich
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on February 19, 2011
Dixon Jones asked to draw up plans for St Petersburg project overseen by Abramovich's girlfriend, Dasha Zhukova
Roman Abramovich has asked the architect of London's revamped Royal Opera House to draw up plans for a £250m palace of culture on a St Petersburg island to be overseen his art-loving girlfriend, Dasha Zhukova.
The Russian billionaire owner of Chelsea football club has invited Dixon Jones architects to draft designs for the eight-hectare New Holland island, Peter the Great's military port, which is bordered by two canals and a river and is a 20-minute walk from the Hermitage museum.
Zhukova, a 29-year old former model, will be the creative director of the project and she is planning to establish an affiliate of her Garage gallery in Moscow, which has become established as the hub of Russia's contemporary art scene.
David Chipperfield, the Stirling prize-winning architect of the rebuilt Neues Museum in Berlin, has also been invited to compete alongside architects from France, the Netherlands, the US and Russia. Artists including Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, a leading US-based husband and wife team, have been asked to feed in design ideas.
The development is being bankrolled by Millhouse, one of Abramovich's companies, but his spokesman, John Mann, denied reports that it would include a home to show off his burgeoning fine art collection which includes paintings by Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon.
"It will be a mixed-use development with commercial and cultural spaces and it will be open to the public," said Mann.
The project will involve the renovation of historic buildings on the 18th-century naval dockyard site, which now sits abandoned and largely covered in rubble. There will be office space as well as cultural attractions and construction will take seven years.
The selected architects are working on their concept designs and there will be a shortlist announcement in March followed by the final decision later in the spring.
In pictures: Frédéric Chaubin’s subversive Soviet superstructures
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on February 8, 2011
Pictures from Frédéric Chaubin's photographic volume documenting the 'fourth age' of Soviet architecture – buildings that show an unexpected rebellion against a decaying system
Swansongs of a superpower: Russia’s secret architecture
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on February 8, 2011
Did this building spell the end of the Soviet empire? Jonathan Glancey on the extraordinary stories behind some of Russia's wildest architecture
Frédéric Chaubin was wandering through a market in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, in 2003 when an old book snared his eye. Although unable to read the words, the French photographer was mesmerised by the images it contained.
Chronicling 70 years of post-revolution architecture, the book featured an extraordinary collection of buildings that drew on an extraordinary collection of styles: as well as the Soviet schools of suprematism (a controlled explosion of geometric forms) and constructivism (wild projections, provocative angles), there was a strong western undercurrent, with echoes of everything from Alvar Aalto and Antoni Gaudí to Oscar Niemeyer. And running through all this was a thrilling element of Soviet over-reaching, a hint of sputniks, space rockets and flying saucers.
Chaubin was hooked. And so began a seven-year odyssey to seek out and photograph some of the Soviet era's most unusual architectural creations, many now under threat. Each one, says Chaubin, was amazing. "It was like finding an undiscovered monument – a Machu Picchu of your own."
Take the highly improbable Georgian Ministry of Highways, a heroic, Jenga-like arrangement of windowed oblongs completed in the mid-1970s. Based on a concept called the Space City method, and showing an eco-awareness way ahead of its time (especially for a highways agency), the ministry takes up little ground area, allowing nature to swarm in under it. Or take the architecture department of the Polytechnic Institute of Minsk: in Chaubin's photograph – which appears in Cosmic Communist Constructions Photographed, the culmination of his odyssey – it resembles some mighty passenger ferry breaking through a frozen Belarussian river.
And then there's the marvellous Druzhba sanatorium by the sea at Yalta, a stack of cogged carousels rising out of a bank of trees, each notch a living space. "It was mistaken for a missile base by Turkish intelligence and the Pentagon," says Chaubin, who is the first to admit that his book is the work of a keen-eyed amateur, not an architecture expert. Perhaps we should be grateful: it's hard to imagine any expert going to the lengths Chaubin did. His book features a ravishing shot of the president of Armenia's holiday home, a glazed modern tower perched on a peninsula that looks out like a sentinel over Lake Sevan and the mountains beyond. To get the picture of the home, which perfectly captures its air of invincibility, Chaubin had to hire a boat and bob about as near as he dared, risking the attentions of the president's well-armed security guards.
Partly because of the language barrier and partly because the creators of these wonders have rarely been feted, this Soviet capacity for exuberant architecture has passed by all but undetected in the west. It comes as a surprise, a shock even. Their openings were recorded, but usually only in Architecture SSSR, a state magazine, or in books such as the series published in 1987 for the 70th anniversary of the October Revolution, celebrating the architecture of each of the 15 Soviet republics in those years; it was this publication that so transfixed Chaubin in the market. There was also the fact that travelling through the Soviet Union, especially off the beaten track, was not exactly encouraged, so many fascinating buildings remained almost unknown outside their homelands.
What really surprised Chaubin, though, was the fact that the most stunning buildings he found had gone up in the dying days of the communist era. "They were nearly all built in the last 15 years of the Soviet Union. It seemed strange, at first, that they were realised in so many different forms – especially as most Soviet architecture was still in the prefabricated style of the mid-1950s laid down by Khrushchev, with cheap concrete, straight Modernist lines, and little place for the artistic imagination."
This, he says, was because the 1970s and 1980s saw an upsurge of local talent, as designers found themselves no longer so shackled by constraints laid down by Moscow. In this way, they could even be read as the swansong of a superpower, created by people freed from centralisation, looking to and borrowing from the west. "You can see in these buildings the break-up of the Soviet Union," says Chaubin, "before the system finally collapsed in 1991."
Universities in Russia are beginning to research the buildings of this era, many of which have been abandoned and are falling into disrepair. They generally share one problem: these were public buildings constructed on a huge scale to impress and inspire local populations, with uses that have become redundant now that the state is no longer all-powerful and all-giving. But in among all the science academies and sports training centres, the sanatoriums, swimming pools and camps for youth movement pioneers, there are also some oddities, such as the "wedding palaces".
These fascinating things, built in prominent locations, were cathedral-like in their ambitions as well as their size. Chaubin concocted a game around his photograph of the Palace of Weddings in Vilnius, capital of Lithuania. He would show it to people and ask them what it could be: a monastery, a power station, maybe even a giant laboratory? "No one guessed it was a registry office for weddings built on a huge scale to encourage people away from getting married in churches."
Chaubin has a serious purpose, too, though: he wants to understand how these buildings came about and who designed them – but the architects have proved hard, if not impossible, to track down. They were civil servants, after all, working for enormous state bureaus. Had they produced such buildings in the west, they might have ended up rich and famous penthouse dwellers; instead, many lived in cramped one-bedroom flats in Soviet-style concrete housing estates.
The floating metropolis
Some of the youngest architects to have worked on these late-Soviet projects are now in their 60s, and have moved onwards and upwards. Oleg Romanov – who in 1985 co-designed a young offenders camp at Bogatyr, Russia, in a zig-zagging style that became known as deconstructivism in the west – is now the vice-president of the St Petersburg Union of Architects. He has been campaigning vigorously against the vast and vulgar Gazprom tower, designed by British architects RMJM, which is threatening to destroy the skyline of what remains one of the most magnificent cities on Earth.
One of Romanov's partners on his camp, built by the inmates and photographed by Chaubrin on a bleak winter's day using a 90-second exposure, was Mark Khidekel. In 1994, Khidekel emigrated to New York to work with Philip Johnson, the personification of decadent, bourgeois capitalist design. And George Chakhava, it turns out, wasn't just lead architect on the magnificent Georgian Ministry of Highways, he was also minister of highway construction. So he allowed himself a free hand in the design, inspired by the work of El Lissitzky, one of the leaders of the suprematist movement. The result – a near metropolis in its own right, complete with roads and buildings criss-crossing each another in the sky – lifted the ministry high above a forest, letting nature and avant-garde architecture live happily together.
Will these gems survive beyond the pages of Chaubin's book? Ruthless property development may yet see most of them perish, with the now valuable land they stand on becoming a place for unimaginative hotels, casinos, resorts, and villas for the rich. In one piece of good news, Chakhava's Highways Ministry was declared a national monument in 2007, the year the architect died. There have since been plans to convert it into an office for the Bank of Georgia. But not all local people are fans: many see it as a glaring symbol of the bad old days. This has been true of many of the buildings photographed by Chaubin, despite his belief that they represent the end of the USSR rather than its continuation.
"I have no nostalgia for the Soviet Union," he says, "but in these strange and wonderful buildings, I saw the skin of a culture that fascinated me."
Melnikov house – in pictures
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on January 16, 2011
Images of revolutionary architect Konstantin Melnikov's Moscow house