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Want to see weird Soviet buildings?

post #1 of 33
10/17/07 at 10:43pm
Thread Starter 
http://www.pingmag.jp/2006/09/13/fre...viet-sf-style/
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post #2 of 33
10/18/07 at 1:00am
Those were really interesting.
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post #3 of 33
10/18/07 at 1:26am
Something really intrigues me about the Slavs. So gaudy, so communist but so cool.
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post #4 of 33
10/18/07 at 2:42am
It is my opinion that Soviet architecture is currently one of the most undervalued styles out there.

Years from now, acadamia will be kicking themselves for not recognizing this earlier.
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post #5 of 33
10/18/07 at 2:54am
These are all excellent. I wonder if there are any examples in China.
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post #6 of 33
10/18/07 at 3:11am
Quote:
Originally Posted by Kent Wang View Post
These are all excellent. I wonder if there are any examples in China.

I think there still might be, an old documentary I recently watched showed quite a few interesting pieces along the Huang He. They were all pretty much black from soot however, which in a way made them frightening.
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post #7 of 33
10/18/07 at 10:07am
Quote:
Originally Posted by LabelKing View Post
Years from now, acadamia will be kicking themselves for not recognizing this earlier.

I actually think the same thing whenever I see an example of Soviet architecture. It's really a lot more inventive than a great deal of the modern architecture produced in the West in the same period.
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post #8 of 33
10/18/07 at 10:34am
Absolutely amazing stuff. Thanks for sharing. It definitely reminded me of stuff out of the original Star Wars movies.
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post #9 of 33
10/18/07 at 12:49pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Edward Appleby View Post
I actually think the same thing whenever I see an example of Soviet architecture. It's really a lot more inventive than a great deal of the modern architecture produced in the West in the same period.

There's not a great deal of literature on this style--in fact, I've only found two books and both by the same author.

I think for someone sufficiently interested, Soviet architecture could be something that they could really blaze an academic trail in since nobody is doing it and I'm sure archives are fairly plentiful.

It's a shame what that idiotic mayor of Moscow is doing with the old Soviet buildings, all those monstrous hotels being demolished for ubiquitous "luxury apartments" or more offensively, parking structures.
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post #10 of 33
10/18/07 at 12:54pm
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post #11 of 33
10/18/07 at 12:57pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by LabelKing View Post
There's not a great deal of literature on this style--in fact, I've only found two books and both by the same author.
What are they?
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post #12 of 33
10/18/07 at 1:04pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Kent Wang View Post
What are they?
Correction, there appears to be about four books now on this subject. Four! http://www.amazon.com/s/103-6090723-...Mozilla-search Also this one seems interesting: http://www.amazon.com/Landmarks-Sovi...2723475&sr=8-6
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post #13 of 33
10/18/07 at 1:45pm
Also these - it's more than ten years since I used these, but I remember they were all quite interesting. (I wrote a forty-page article where I compared Russian, German and Italian architecture in the thirties, and then forgot all about it, as you do.) Kyrill S. Afanasjew: Ideen - Projekten - Bauten - Sowjetische Architektur 1917 bis 1932, Verlag der Kunst, Dresden, 1973 Alexei Tarkov and Sergei Kavtaradze: Stalinist Architecture, Laurence King, London, 1992 Igor Golomstock: Totalitarian Art, Collins Harvill, 1990 Adolf Max Vogt: Russische und Französische Revolutionsarchitektur 1917/1789, Verlag M DuMont, Schauberg, 1974 Anders Åman: Architecture and Ideology in Eastern Europe during the Stalin Era, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1992 There are actually quite a bit of literature - totalitarian architecture was a "hip" academic subject in the wake of post-modernism. See Leon Krier's huge book about Speer as an example. Most of this activity focussed on the Stalin era, but there is a lot of stuff written about the modernist stuff as well. Of the Eastern Bloc countries, I think East Germany and Yugoslavia had the best examples of the more Western-style modernist architecture, particuarly from the sixties and onwards.
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post #14 of 33
10/18/07 at 3:43pm
Form without function=pure art.

Structural and ventilation problems galore.

Moscow is full of those Stalinist buildings that look much more impressive and taller than empire state bldng in NYC.
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post #15 of 33
10/18/07 at 4:54pm
Lucky Strike, I've seen a fair amount of literature on Nazi/Fascist architecture and also some on Stalinist architecture, but precious little on the later Khrushchev/Brezhnev era stuff, which frankly, I find more interesting than the hodge-podge Stalinist styles. There's also a lot of interesting Soviet avant-garde architecture, which unfortunately is not being recognized and properly preserved.
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