East of the Iron Curtain Trail, scattered across fourteen former Soviet republics, lie the decaying and abandoned architectural relics of the final decades of the USSR. Concrete and chaotic, the Soviet structures that sprang up there between 1970 and 1991 are like nothing ever seen before.
These constructions, with their strong cosmic undercurrents, were the realisation of the futurist fantasies of Eastern Bloc architects whose designs delved deep into the realms of imagination; in the town of Kiev, Ukraine, stands a satellite-shaped crematorium contoured by giant flames of concrete, and situated on a busy street nearby, is the Institute of Scientific Research with a flying saucer casually protruding from its roof. This highly expressive style of architecture is testimony perhaps, to a decrease in artistic suppression post-Stalin, as well as to the loosening of strict Soviet policies by his successive leaders Brezhnev and Gorbachev.
These brutal, beautiful monuments to an era of crumbling communism are, however, endangered, with many set to be destroyed to make way for new developments. Fortunately, this final age of Soviet architecture has been captured by French photographer FrédéricChaubin. Recently published, his book CCCP: Cosmic Communist Constructions Photographed is an in-depth exploration of this distinctly experimental late-Soviet style of architecture that was born during a period of decay in the USSR. One thing becomes immediately clear; these exuberant and otherworldly buildings were bastions of continuing hope and encapsulated the dreams of the Soviet Union to transcend all that had been and to build a utopian world, despite the increasing disintegration of their nation.
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