Frédéric Chaubin. CCCP. Cosmic Communist Constructions Photographed

<p>Elected the architectural book of the year by the International Artbook and Film Festival in Perpignan, France, Frédéric Chaubin’s&#xa0;<em>Cosmic Communist Constructions Photographed&#xa0;</em>explores&#xa0;<strong>90 buildings in 14 former Soviet Republics</strong>. Each of these structures expresses what Chaubin considers the&#xa0;<strong>fourth age of Soviet architecture</strong>, an unknown burgeoning that took place&#xa0;<strong>from 1970 until 1990</strong>.<br /><br />Contrary to the 1920s and 1950s, no “school” or main trend emerges here. These buildings represent a<strong>&#xa0;chaotic impulse brought about by a decaying system</strong>. Taking advantage of the collapsing monolithic structure,&#xa0;<strong>architects went far beyond modernism,&#xa0;</strong>going back to the roots or freely innovating. Some of the daring ones completed projects that the&#xa0;<strong>Constructivists</strong>&#xa0;would have dreamt of (Druzhba Sanatorium, Yalta), others expressed their imagination in an&#xa0;<strong>expressionist&#xa0;</strong>way (Palace of Weddings, Tbilisi).<br /><br />A summer camp, inspired by sketches of a prototype lunar base, lays claim to&#xa0;Suprematist&#xa0;influence (Prometheus youth camp, Bogatyr). Then comes the&#xa0;<strong>“speaking architecture”</strong>&#xa0;widespread in the last years of the USSR: a crematorium adorned with concrete flames (Crematorium, Kiev), a technological institute with a&#xa0;flying saucer&#xa0;crashed on the roof (Institute of Scientific Research, Kiev), a political center watching you like&#xa0;Big Brother&#xa0;(House of Soviets, Kaliningrad).<br /><br />In their puzzle of styles, their outlandish strategies, these buildings are&#xa0;<strong>extraordinary remnants of a collapsing system</strong>. In their diversity and local exoticism, they testify both to the&#xa0;<strong>vast geography of the USSR&#xa0;</strong>and its encroaching end of the Soviet Union, the holes in a widening net. At the same time, they immortalize many of the&#xa0;<strong>ideological dreams of the country and its time</strong>, from an obsession with the cosmos to the rebirth of identity.</p>