CCCP: Cosmic Communist Constructions Photographed by Frdric Chaubin review
These images of Soviet architecture from the Brezhnev era are simply out of this world
Soviet brutalism is not something traditionally thought of as beautiful, but Frdric Chaubin's stunning photographs, published under the facetious title CCCP: Cosmic Communist Constructions Photographed, should go some way to changing this.
Fascinated by the massive scale of Brezhnev-era architecture, the French photographer has toured the former Soviet Union since 2003, in search of dramatic examples of these sculptural buildings. The 1970s-1990s was a strong period for Soviet architecture, especially in the peripheral republics, where outlandish designs were an expression of the striving for independence, an early inkling of the break-up of the USSR.
Architects at this time picked up where they left off following the suppression of the avant-garde by Stalin in the early 1930s, and were able to capitalise on advances made in engineering in the interim period, producing buildings with enormous internal spaces and dramatic cantilevered protrusions. These were the final emphatic declarations of the solidity of communism before it cracked up.
Chaubin mostly concentrates on the edges of the former empire: the Baltic states, the Caucasus and central Asia, and particularly on buildings set in wide open landscape, which look like deposits from outer space.
As the title suggests, these ambitious constructions were part of the attempt to keep a competitive edge over America during the space race. Enormous concrete circuses, built in most major Soviet cities from the late 1950s onwards, look like flying saucers, as does the now shabby Ukrainian Institute of Scientific and Technological Research in Kiev. Even palaces of marriage register offices look like the dwellings of Martian princes.
Because the Soviet society for which these buildings were constructed no longer exists, many of them are defunct and abandoned. Sanitoriums once replete with elaborate modernistic glass! chandel iers and asymmetrical swimming pools are no longer maintained, due to a lack of funds and, among those who can afford it, a preference for holidaying abroad.
Chaubin has caught these buildings at an interesting time, when many are under threat of being bulldozed to make way for new developments. But equally, a broad public is waking up to their inventiveness and craftsmanship, irrespective of the repressive political state that spawned them. It would have been valuable to have more information about what is happening in these buildings today, but, nevertheless, this book is a bold foray into an architectural period that is barely documented, either in the former Soviet Union or the west.
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