Archinect - News

New photos depicting North Korea's 'Architecture of Control'

2024-05-20T18:41:00-04:00

Reuters has published images of the DPRK's showcase architecture in a new photo essay titled 'Architecture of control: North Korea's bizarre, post-modern cityscapes,' which shows a rare glimpse at the post-modern building activity in Pyongyang.

It comes as the state pursues a new building program meant to yield 50,000 new residences in the capital by about this time next year, an effort aided by labor from military academy cadets and meant to match its housing shortage at "Pyongyang Speed."

The architectural designers of most of these buildings remain unknown. Their likely source is the nearby Paektusan Academy of Architecture.

MVRDV completes transformation of communist-era Tirana Pyramid monument in Albania

2023-10-17T20:11:00-04:00

The transformation of an aging brutalist monument to communism into a new tech education center geared toward teenagers in the capital city of Albania has been officially inaugurated following a three-and-a-half-year revitalization effort led by MVRDV.

The project remade the 127,000-square-foot Pyramid of Tirana, first established as a museum dedicated to the legacy of dictator Enver Hoxha in 1988, into the centerpiece of a new cultural hub and park space located in the heart of the city.

Image: © Ossip van Duivenbode/MVRDV

Brightly-colored boxes are stacked within, around, and on top of the original structure, providing areas for education and events programming, while the addition of outdoor steps to its sloping beams creates intriguing new public space possibilities for visitors. Some see it as a testament to the country’s dogged ability to overcome the collective memory of the Hoxha regime. MVRDV hopes it will turn into a “carrier” for the cult...

'I knew I had to do something': A Bulgarian architect on preserving a monument to her country's ugly past

2022-05-24T12:00:00-04:00

What do you do with a building that was built to glorify an oppressive Communist system but, ravaged by rain and snow and stripped bare by thieves, is now a wreck? Should it be torn down in the spirit of reckoning with history — just as the statues of Confederate generals have been toppled in the United States and monuments to Soviet hegemony have been demolished across Ukraine, particularly since Russia invaded in February?

After receiving two rounds of funding totaling $245,000 from the Getty Foundation in back-to-back years, the ever-popular photographer’s subject is struggling to raise the millions needed to restore it to the former 'glory' seen in what its designer Georgi Stoilov called “morally and materially superior times.”

Bulgarian Architect Dora Ivanova, who is leading a new push to conserve the Buzludzha Monument, says she “does not want to glorify the past” but rather intends to use its grimy edifice as an educational tool that fills a void in her native country’s national conversation about its less-than-sterling communist history.

“We don’t want a museum freezing everything as it was,” she told the New York Times, “but a place for discussion about the past. The idea is to overcome this silence — the shame of talking about what happened.”

...

Despite stigma and war, preservationists are fighting to keep Ukraine's Soviet-era architecture intact

2022-05-10T12:45:00-04:00

Attitudes towards Soviet-era architectural heritage are divided in Ukraine. Some value the country’s modernist, post-modernist and brutalist buildings for their sharpness and conciseness of form, for their functionality and concrete simplicity. But for others they stand as an unwanted reminder of Ukraine’s Soviet past, and much of this built heritage has come under threat in recent years.

Ukraine’s pre-WWII cultural infrastructure has been a focus of the press and comprises the vast majority of listed buildings in Ukraine’s state database. Examples of Soviet-era architecture are, however, systemically less protected. Their plight is being well-documented by social media activists like ukrainemodernism and has reignited a debate amongst preservationists inside Ukraine as to their rightful place in a country some feel is under threat of losing its national identity.

“Any way you put it, it’s our heritage,” photographer Dmytro Soloviov told Al Jazeera of his personal philosophy. “Regardless of your political affiliation, these are buildings and art objects that were created by Ukrainians.”

The preservationist cause is also being folded into the country’s plans to rebuild following the cessation of hostilities. Some hope they will include the Stalinist and Soviet-era s...

Oscar Niemeyer’s Communist Party Headquarters showcases a trippy Stella McCartney ready-to-wear show for Paris Fashion Week

2021-10-07T19:52:00-04:00

Under the Brutalist concrete dome of the Espace Niemeyer, the headquarters of the French Communist Party, which it turns out also bears a marked resemblance to a Martian bio-dome, the voice of the American mycologist Paul Stamets boomed out, reciting a paean to the powers of fungi to open the show.

Located in the Colonel Fabien in Paris’ 19th arrondissement, the sinewy building has been a favorite among fashion week art directors since the party’s finances dictating renting out the building after its opening in 1980. Fashion mainstays like Thom Browne, Yeezy, Prada, and others have all graced its auditorium whose 11-meter-high dome dutifully provides a cool, futuristic-looking backdrop for catwalkers underneath.

Video courtesy Stella McCartney on YouTube.

During his lifetime, Niemeyer ran in circles that included many prominent clothing designers like Piere Cardin and was a well-known admirer and collaborator with the fashion world as evidenced by his 2012 sneaker collection from Converse. Some pieces in the Stella McCartney show were made of a mushroom-based vegan leather called Mylo. Vogue has a full review of the collection here.

MVRDV transforms dated communist monument into dynamic cultural center

2021-02-18T14:33:00-05:00

Construction has started on the Pyramid of Tirana, the brutalist monument in the heart of Albania’s capital city. The renovation was designed by MVRDV and will transform the building into a dynamic cultural hub, undoing its previous status as a showpiece of Communist dictator Enver Hoxha.

MVRDV's design will open up the building, of which the concrete structure will be reused, by stripping the work from previous partially completed renovations. Moreover, trees and other greenery will soften the materiality of the space, while boxes containing individual rooms placed in and around the structure, will create a "village of classrooms, studios, cafes, and restaurants."

"Working on a brutalist monument like the Pyramid is a dream," said Winy Maas, founding partner at MVRDV. "It is striking and interesting to see how the country struggled with the future of the building, which on one hand is a controversial chapter in the country's history, and on the other hand has already been partly re...

The Berlin Wall made discoverable again via AR, 30 years after its fall

2019-08-27T17:36:00-04:00

The installation is part of a week-long festival running from 4-10 November for the 30th anniversary. It aims to “celebrate the successes of the revolution and to recall the joy at regained freedoms and the risks and pains of social upheaval,” according to a statement from the organisers, Kulturprojekte Berlin.

As the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall approaches this November, various art projects prepare to commemorate the events of the peaceful 1989 revolution throughout the city.

Via large-scale interactive installations, 3D video projections, and an augmented reality app, artists seek to give back relevance and historic significance to places that can easily be overlooked and forgotten.

An AR version of the old Berlin Wall "death strip" fortification overlaid on a Berlin sidewalk via the MauAR app. Image via mauar.berlin.

Photographers rethink the Eastern Bloc

2019-08-12T13:30:00-04:00

All were built after World War II to cheaply house the masses in a way that jived with communist ideology. Near-identical two- and three-bedroom apartments included amenities like central heat, private bathrooms, and elevators. Standardization and mass production were paramount, though idiosyncrasies—a pop of color here, a geometric motif there—inevitably crept in.

David Navarro and Martyna Sobecka, the dynamic duo that make up the independent publisher/design studio Zupagrafika have trekked the Eastern Bloc in an effort to capture its hidden treasures. Their adventure has been published in a book called Eastern Blocks.

"Eastern Blocks is a photographic journey through the cityscapes of the former Eastern Bloc, inviting readers to explore the districts and peripheries that became a playground for mass housing development after WW2, including objects like houses ‘on chicken legs’, soviet ‘flying saucers’ or hammer-shaped tower blocks," reads the publisher's website.

The Nonument Group: digitally preserving architectural treasures before they're lost

2019-08-01T16:25:00-04:00

Working with an international team of researchers and artists, Tomšič and Bricelj Baraga study, map and archive fading sites and Brutalist-style structures. They’re building a database of about 120 case studies across Europe and in former Soviet states and will be releasing a book this year.

"Using a surveying and data-collection process known as photogrammetry and a series of high-powered computer workstations, a team led by Georgios Artopoulos will create a digital model of the monument for use with virtual reality headsets or smartphones," writes the Guardian's Nate Berg about the efforts of the Nonument Group to map and document the rapidly deteriorating and severely vandalized Monument House of the Bulgarian Communist Party (also known as the Buzludzha Monument) — one of many "hidden, abandoned, unwanted or otherwise forgotten" contemporary heritage sites the group aims to digitally preserve before they're gone forever.

The badly damaged interior of the Buzludzha Monument Auditorium. Photo: Stanislav Traykov/Wikimedia Commons

New exhibition documents the rise and fall of East Berlin's famed Palast der Republik

2019-06-10T14:33:00-04:00

Berlin’s Palast der Republik, the asbestos-riddled home of the powerless East German parliament that was demolished more than a decade ago, is being commemorated in a new exhibition at the Rostock art museum, a building also constructed under the Communist regime that narrowly escaped the same end.

"Built between 1973 and 1976 on the site of the former Berlin City Palace, the Palace of the Republic was the seat of the GDR’s government or Volkskammer (People’s Chamber), but also served as a public cultural center with a plethora of event spaces and culinary offerings," reads the description of the new exhibition Palast der Republik: Utopia, Inspiration, Politics at the Kunsthalle Rostock.

The iconic building in 1977. Image via Wikipedia.

"Daily activities took place in the Great Hall, the restaurants, the disco in the youth club, the theater, and the Spree Bowling Alley. In 1990 the Palace of the Republic was closed due to the emission of carcinogenic asbestos fibers, and the building was demolished from 2006 to 2008. In 2019 the Humboldt Forum will open in the reconstructed Berlin Palace at the same site."

The exhibition opened on May 31 and will run through October 13.

Soviet architecture is the star of a new immersive indie video game called It's Winter

2019-03-14T21:15:00-04:00

It’s nighttime and you find yourself in a small, dark flat in a nondescript suburb in Russia. You look out of the window and see the courtyard covered in snow, illuminated by street lamps and the cold neon glare of storefronts. You turn on the light switch and look around your apartment. This is the melancholy start of a new immersive game made by developer Alexander Ignatov and poet Ilia Mazo.

The setting and landscapes of video game worlds add to the overall gaming experience, particularly free roaming games. Called a "sandbox" in the gaming community, the mission-less free to roam game allows the player to wander throughout the virtual world. Without a plot or mission to accomplish, gamers are allowed to do everything and nothing in the game It's Winter. Left with very little to dictate gameplay, the immersive gaming experience created by developer Alexander Ignatov and poet Ilia Mazo immerses players into a mundane suburban Russian tower block.

It's Winter game play still, Image © Alexander Ignatov and Ilia Mazo

According to the developer the "post-Soviet and sad 3D game" has nothing awaiting the player. "There is no chance to get out, no room for adventures, nor a breathtaking plot.” All you have to do is experience the precisely detailed, pixelated mundanity of the world around you." The only thing players are left with, however, are the detailed building interiors a...

Toward a Concrete Utopia reviewed

2019-03-11T15:03:00-04:00

The North American layman tends to consider the Eastern bloc as a homogenous chunk of misery. It falls to the curators then to differentiate the USSR from Yugoslavia, and they are not off to a good start. Simultaneously, they are obliged to titillate concrete-loving Instagrammers with images of Brutalist hulks. Only once these two aims are achieved can they pose the salient question: does Yugoslav architecture merit more study than a social media scroll?

In his piece for The Observer, George Grylls reviews MoMA's highly publicized exhibition, Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948–1980, which recently came to a close in New York.

Miodrag Živković, Monument to the Battle of Sutjeska, 1965-71, Tjentište, Bosnia and Herzegovina. View of the western exposure. Photo: Valentin Jeck, commissioned by The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2017.

"In truth, the exhibition has been teasing us for its big finale," Grylls writes. "And just when you were about to ask for your money back, you get what you came for – spomeniki, lumbering onto stage like the Rolling Stones dutifully returning for an obligatory encore."

Displaying relics of Soviet architecture on your desk has never been easier

2019-01-24T15:59:00-05:00

Authored and published by Zupagrafika, and now featured in our Downtown LA retail store and online at Archinect Outpost, these miniature versions of brutalist structures from former Eastern Bloc countries can now rest easily on your desk or bookshelf.

House of Soviets (Kaliningrad, Russia). Authored and Published by Zupagrafika.

The Brutal East cutouts are authored and published by Zupagrafika, an independent design studio established in 2012 by a Hispano-Polish duo David Navarro and Martyna Sobecka in Poznań, Poland. The studio has a special affinity with Polish Poster School, post-war modernist architecture and paper.

Representing structures from Belgrade, Chisinau, Kaliningrad, Prague, St. Petersburg, Vilnius and Wrocław, these cutouts are faithfully illustrated with the ravages of time and hints of graffiti. The Brutal East kit comes with seven cutouts, each of which requires a ruler, and box cutter and white glue to construct.

Novosmolenskaya Housing Complex (St. Petersburg, ...

East Berlin’s Plattenbau may rise to new heights

2018-09-06T15:08:00-04:00

Berlin has decided on a novel location to host some of the new apartments the city badly needs—on top of the old ones. Yesterday, Berlin’s Senate announced a project to add more units on top of already existing buildings in the city’s east, with a possible capacity of up to 50,000 new homes. The plan to add floors isn’t novel in itself, of course, even in Berlin. What’s striking is the specific type of building chosen for the experiment: East Berlin’s Plattenbau.

This beautiful short film celebrates Ukraine’s Soviet-era Brutalist heritage

2018-07-18T17:27:00-04:00

Kiev is a city of eclectic beauty, with modernist landmarks that dot the skyline. But as the capital grows and evolves, many of these Soviet-era gems are falling out of favour and into disrepair, with many already cleared away to make room for newer projects.

The short Soviet Modernism, Brutalism, Post-Modernism: Buildings and Projects in Ukraine from 1960 – 1990 was recently released in support of the upcoming book of the same title, examining some of Kiev's remarkable concrete architecture heritage.

Still from Soviet Modernism, Brutalism, Post-Modernism.

While focusing on Ukraine, director Roman Blazhan reflects on the universal conflict of each generation's ever changing appreciation and rejection of the previous generation's understanding of architecture.

Still from Soviet Modernism, Brutalism, Post-Modernism.

"Director of Photography Mikhail Volkov used a vintage lens (made in beginning of the 70s in the Soviet Union) in combination with a Japanese vintage anamorphic lense," reads the film description. "This setup made the picture not very sharp, very light, with warm anamorphic flares. And the fixed focal length of 75 mm enc...

Bulgaria's Buzludzha Monument opens its doors for the first time in eight years, with restoration plans underway

2018-05-23T15:00:00-04:00

Officially called the “House-Monument of the Bulgarian Communist Party”, the building fell into disrepair following the collapse of the country's socialist government in 1989, but remains a popular landmark and tourist attraction. The trip comes before an expected visit by European and Bulgarian experts at the end of 2018, who will report on the building’s structural integrity with the view of opening it officially to tourists.

Albania's communist-era pyramid will be transformed by MVRDV into a Center for Technology, Art and Culture

2018-05-18T14:33:00-04:00

A bizarre building in the middle of Albania's capital, the Pyramid of Tirana has been the site of continuous debate over its uncertain future. Built as a monument to the country's Stalinist leader, Enver Hoxha, construction of the pyramid-shaped structure completed shortly before the collapse of communism.

As national attitudes began to change, the building shifted from a museum to a convention center, and has since functioned as a military base for NATO, a television studio, and a nightclub. Though not in complete disuse, the pyramid has sat dilapidated and vandalized for the past decade amidst debates over its preservation. The government had wanted to raze the structure in order to build a sleek new parliament building, but citizens and activists have wanted to see their communist heritage, however dark, preserved.

Image: Gent Onuzi

This is all to change now as designs to transform the communist-era pyramid into a Center for Technology, Art and Culture have been revealed. “The Py...

You can now play Tetris with Soviet-style housing blocks

2018-04-18T14:13:00-04:00

If you've been around the 'architecture-can-be-fun-too'-focused internet for a while, you may remember Sergej Hein's semi-viral gem of a video, Berlin Block Tetris, which was exactly that: an animated version of the video game classic using building blocks that resembled socialist-era residential high-rises.

Lithuanian designer Lukas Valiauga has now taken the idea to the next, interactive, level and created the mobile app Tower Block Game.

Tower Block Game by Lukas Valiauga

"This game is a playful tribute to a not so playful reality of monotonous and bleak cityscapes built out of same prefabricated concrete blocks," the app description explains. "Very specific for Eastern-Europe but evident everywhere else, too. These relic tower blocks usually mark failed social programmes and neighbourhoods planned as clumsy as some failed building block game… On that note, build and demolish one for yourself!"

Tower Block Game is available for Android from the Google Play store.

Not much of a gam...

Lithuanian design studio Gyva Grafika transforms bathroom tiles into apartment block windows

2018-03-21T19:43:00-04:00

A couple of years ago, Lithuanian design studio Gyva Grafika was tasked with redecorating the bathroom of a local restaurant in the city of Kaunas, about 62 miles west of Vilnius. They came up with a uniquely nostalgic idea: bathroom tiles that make the stalls take on the appearance of the panel buildings that came to represent the whole of the Eastern Bloc (and spread to other Communist countries, like Cuba).

A sample tile design by Gyva Grafika

Without having to replace the pre-existing tiles, the firm created stickers that, placed on top of the tiles, would create the appearance of a Soviet-era public housing block. The design intervention was done for Galeria Urbana bar—a hipster hot-spot in the city of Kaunas, Lithuania—and carried out by Gyva Grafika, a local studio specializing in graphics and design. The project has been so successful that the studio has even begun selling them.

Explore Soviet architecture while dancing through Moscow

2018-03-01T14:26:00-05:00

A new tour group fusing Soviet architecture with the latest Russian electronica is launching a series of outdoor parties amid the historic courtyards of central Moscow. Culture group MosKultProg will be holding two events in March, mixing historian Sergey Niktin's historical tour along Moscow's legendary Kutuzovsky Prospekt with sets from St Peterburg-based DJ Egor Holkin.

Moscow keeps expanding its options for exploring the city's mesmerizing architecture: if you've done the virtual/augmented reality tours of never-realized icons of Soviet architecture and already 'Pokémon Go-caught' all the famous figures of Russian history via the Know Moscow.Photo. app, you can now take an architectural walking dancing tour while grooving to epic DJ sets of Egor Holkin.

The organizers behind the concept, TanzProg, plan to bring their edutainment initiative also to other European cities this summer, including London and Paris.

The Moscow That Never Was: new VR/AR tour showcases unrealized icons of Soviet architecture

2018-01-04T15:24:00-05:00

New virtual reality tours are giving Muscovites the chance to see the Russian capital as the socialist utopia envisioned by the city’s Soviet architects. The new project, The Moscow That Never Was, lets visitors glimpse shelved Soviet landmarks as they should have appeared on Moscow’s streets using VR goggles.

The 2-hour virtual/augmented reality tours through central Moscow feature utopian architectural projects that never quite saw the light of day, including the infamous Palace of the Soviets (imagined as the world's tallest building, crowned with a 300-ft Lenin statue), an alternate Lenin Mausoleum, Stalin's eighth 'sisters' skyscraper in Zarayadye Park, the People's Commissariat of Heavy Industry HQ on Red Square, among others.

More information about the The Moscow That Never Was tours here.

All images via Retro Futuro.

Restricted Areas: abandoned Soviet structures photographed in all their eerie beauty

2016-07-25T20:24:00-04:00

Danila Tkachenko is a Russian photographer whose series Restricted Areas crystallises the tendencies of many artists working on themes of the post-Soviet space. As Calvert 22’s Power and Architecture season demonstrates, there is a healthy interest in the abandoned or neglected buildings that once served as landmarks of Soviet ambition: the rack and ruin of utopia. What sets Tkachenko apart is the unforgiving simplicity of his compositions.

All photos from Danila Tkachenko's series Restricted Areas. For far more of these beauties, head over to Calvert Journal.

On the rapid privatization of public space in post-communist cities

2016-04-21T15:12:00-04:00

From 1917 to 1991 in the former Russian Empire, and from 1945 to 1989 in the countries it dominated after the war, there was no real private ownership. No landowners, no developers, no “placemakers” - in half of Europe. Did this mean public space was done differently, and are attitudes to it different in those countries? [...] observed more closely, public space here is every bit as complex as it is elsewhere in Europe.

Owen Hatherley's history of communist architecture remains "under the spell of socialism"

2015-09-10T13:52:00-04:00

To [Hatherley], architecture is the physical manifestation of politics. It is power literally in bricks and mortar. In this respect he is unusual and, I believe, right. But he is handicapped at every turn by his belief, worn on his sleeve, in the nobility of the socialist cause. This can be an asset as he wrestles manfully to evoke the spirit of places from which most of us would turn in horror.

More from British architecture writer Owen Hatherley here, and on communist architecture:

Creepy Photos of Russia’s Crumbling Communist Architecture

2014-08-05T12:51:00-04:00

English photographer Rebecca Litchfield braved radiation and KGB-style interrogation techniques to capture the beauty of this bygone era in a series called Soviet Ghosts. Her work took her to schools, hospitals, factories, and accidentally, a top secret radar installation. “Many of the abandoned buildings are pretty unknown to the public, they are hidden behind tall fences and gates, I think it is easy to just pass without knowing what is inside,” says Litchfield.

Timothy Allen's photographic exploration of a Bulgarian ruin

2012-11-12T11:54:00-05:00

The argument for preserving old buildings is a very strong one that I wholeheartedly support myself. However. On the rare occasions that I get to visit a forgotten building as magnificent as this one, I can’t help day dreaming about some of the incredible monumental relics I know back home and quietly wishing that a few more of them had been left to grow old and perish naturally rather than being unceremoniously hooked up to the proverbial life support machine of modern tourism...

Photographer, Timothy Allen, explores the ruins at the Buzludzha monument in Bulgaria.

Memories of East Germany's Showcase

2010-09-21T14:19:00-04:00

The Palast der Republik was a showpiece building in East Berlin, a congress hall as well as a center for public entertainment. By 1993 it had been sealed off to the public. Thorsten Klapsch was the last photographer to capture its interiors before a long period of demolition began.

Berlin Block Tetris

2009-10-16T17:27:00-04:00

Aaaand here's yet another Berlin-related post: Berlin Block Tetris from Sergej Hein on Vimeo.

Sergej Hein: "It´s kind of a parody about the former socialist building style. They use to build whole cities, without any change in House design or room layout to create cheep housing for workers (we call them Blocks). In Soviet times you could easily wake up at a friends place in another city and still feel like you are in your flat as the furniture was the same as well...

I was living in a Block on the opposite side of the street in Berlin 2 years ago. Living there remind me of my early childhood in Riga where we had nearly the same Blocks.

I think Alexei Paschitnow, the inventor of Tetris, had kind of the same Idea as me in spring 1984. I bet he was looking out of the window of his Block in Moscow and thought how do soviet architects actually plan this buildings?"