When you think of Soviet architecture, you’re more than likely to conjure up images of grey concrete boxes with all the extravagance and variety of an Alan Shearer goal celebration.
A new book, however, reveals Eastern Bloc buildings that resemble a sci-fi writer’s erotic dream. They’re still grey, mind.
Featuring 90 structures from 14 former Soviet states, Cosmic Communist Constructions Photographed by Frédéric Chaubin looks at the imagination that engulfed the latter years of the Soviet era, from the Seventies to its demise in 1990.
Such were the creative restraints of previous decades that, once the straps loosened, architects went way beyond
the limits imposed by most Western planning committees. The results, such as the giant Jenga game that is the Georgian Ministry Of Highways (pictured above), are some of the world’s best-kept architectural secrets.
If you think how excited we get about London’s Gherkin, imagine if we had a children’s summer camp inspired by a prototype lunar base like the Prometheus youth camp in Bogatyr, Russia, or a government research facility with a flying saucer ‘crashed’ on to its roof like the Institute Of Scientific Research in Kiev. Spooks would have a field day.
