Archinect - News

Cooper Union postpones Vkhutemas exhibition in light of the ongoing war in Ukraine

2023-01-26T17:11:00-05:00

An exhibition at The Cooper Union examining Vkhutemas has been postponed by the institution amidst criticisms relating to the ongoing war in Ukraine. Vkhutemas was a Soviet art and technical school that existed from 1920 to 1930. It was a pioneer in the field of art and design education in the Soviet Union, playing a significant role in shaping the aesthetic of early Soviet art and architecture.

In an op-ed published on Archinect last week, Peder Anker, a Professor in History at NYU, outlined his opposition to the show, which was to be staged in the Houghton Gallery, just steps away from the Ukrainian Village and several important cultural sites associated with the large Ukrainian diaspora group that resides in New York City.

Previously on Archinect: The Cooper Union Promotes Russian Architecture. Why?

The op-ed originally suggested that Anna Bokov, the show's curator, is engaging in Russian propaganda, with direct ties to Vladimir Putin through her father, Andrey Bokov, the Nationa...

In Kyiv, a virtual tour guide shows the world what's left to uphold

2022-08-30T12:24:00-04:00

Soloviov’s virtual tours, which he announces on his Instagram page, have also become a way of coping with present circumstances. He says that during the pandemic and now the war, he has missed meeting visiting foreigners, some of whom were his most inquisitive tour participants. Now, he’s meeting them in their living rooms.

Dmytro Soloviov is unlike the many Ukrainian citizen journalists using social media to inform the non-traditional, non-television-connected audience about their war-torn home. Evacuated at the outset to the western Carpathian Mountains region, he began offering in-person and then (upon his return to the capital) virtual tours to audiences who described them alternatively as either “very intimate” or as places of refuge.

He says he won’t offer reviews of bomb-damaged buildings as a rule and is working to preserve the country's stock of Soviet-era architecture so as not to see it fall victim to war's terrible cycle of destruction — even after the shelling stops. “What will our descendants know of the 20th century in Ukraine if we demolished it all?” he said. “What will they think? That we did nothing?”

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...

An Instagram account with an eye on Soviet-era modernism is cropping up in Ukraine

2021-10-14T11:55:00-04:00

An IT specialist in his 30s, he says that his interest in his hometown’s Soviet-era architectural history began gradually, starting with an appreciation of 19th-century neoclassical architecture. From there, he became interested in constructivism, and finally, modernism. “I began to understand that these [Soviet-era buildings] were not just ‘boring, Soviet panels’, as most people thought of them, but perhaps masterpieces of world architecture.”

The Ukrainian port city of Odesa offers a unique blend of popular 19th-century styles and Soviet-era modernism. Architect Heinrich Topuz’s Academic Theatre of Musical Comedy, completed in 1981, stands as one of the city’s best examples of building in the period. Similar social media tributes to modernism remain among the more popular for design fans online.

“My Instagram account will become an architectural monument to the Odesa which we have lost,” the curator of @odessamodernism told The Calvert Journal. Currently, the account has over 6,000 followers.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by architecture | design | art (@odessamodernism)

Chernobyl’s nuclear “sarcophagus” to be dismantled

2019-08-19T07:00:00-04:00

Workers are taking down Chernobyl's "sarcophagus," once meant to keep the reactor's radioactive materials locked inside, before it falls on its own accord. The dismantling will begin after the New Shelter Containment (NSC) is in full working operation. Currently, the NSC controls part of the confinement. Earlier this year, the European Union handed off control of the NSC to Ukraine.

The steel and concrete containment structure, hastily erected following the nuclear disaster at the Chernobyl power plant in 1986, is being replaced by internationally funded and coordinated effort. The new shelter, a €1.5 billion complex considered to be the largest work of movable architecture in the world, has been in the works for several years.

Plans call for the old “sarcophagus” to be fully replaced by 2023.

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.

Exploring the architecture of Soviet Asia with Roberto Conte and Stefano Perego

2019-04-30T15:35:00-04:00

There is still much to uncover from the influence Soviet politics had on modern architecture. As writer Roberto Conte and photographer Stefano Perego make evident in their collaborative book, Soviet Asia, there were significant strides in soviet architecture outside of former Yugoslavia, as the two explored the public buildings and monuments of the former Soviet republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan built between 1950 and the fall of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).

Soviet Asia, by Roberto Conte and Stefano Perego.

Unlike the architecture of former Yugoslavia, the work documented in Soviet Asia is undeniably influenced by ancient Eastern architecture, including Islamic mosaics and Persian geometric patterns.

Photo by Stefano Perego.

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, ...

Concrete Utopia

2018-11-14T09:22:00-05:00

In the construction of the new Yugoslavia, modernist thinking and design were deployed to guide the country’s rapid urbanization and industrialization as well as to unify the ethnically, religiously, and culturally diverse population.

In columnist Belmont Freeman's latest article for Places, he examines the exhibition “Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948-1980,” now on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and finds a rigorous and revealing survey of Yugoslavia’s extraordinary built legacy that until now has been neglected by mainstream architectural historians.

How emerging designers find inspiration in socialist-era brutalist architecture

2018-09-19T09:00:00-04:00

Bold and unforgiving, the Brutalist landmarks and modernist housing estates which sprang up across Europe in the wake of the Second World War still dominate cities in the former Eastern bloc. [...] The Calvert Journal talked to designers and creatives across the New East who are now reclaiming socialist-era Brutalism as a driving force behind their work, changing mindsets, updating old designs for the modern age and making their own statements on gentrification, nostalgia and innovation.

The Brutalism-inspired design products by (mostly Eastern) European creatives Calvert Journal talked to range from stylish Russian flower vases to nostalgic Slovak pre-fab panelák furniture, German post-war housing cuckoo clocks, a Modernist Belgrade Map, and Polish miniature tower block building kits and Polaroid photo projects.

"Cuckoo Block" series by Guido Zimmermann, Germany.

"Brutal East" by Zupagrafika, Poland.

Find more design creations here.

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...

Pull back the negative and discover the brutal charm of the European capitals’ suburbia!

2018-06-15T13:58:00-04:00

Poland-based Zupagrafika has long made their fascination with Brutalism known, selling a range of pop-out and build concrete modernist structures from cities around the world. Now, the design studio has launched a new photo project for Brutalist fans to enjoy, that allows buyers to "remove the negative and discover the brutal charm of European suburbia."

Described as interactive photo boxes, the four packets—focused on the cities of Warsaw, Berlin, Moscow and London—come with 8 interactive cards, resembling Polaroid 55 films. Users are expected to pull the negative apart, revealing images of post-war modernist estates.

“Modernist housing estates erected in the suburbs of European cities after the Second World War have been ignored and neglected for decades,” says Zupagrafika. "Although they are homes to the vast majority of urbanites, many would rather they were invisible." Through these photographs, shot by Zupagrafika along with photographers Alexander Veryovkin and Peter Chadwick...

The tower block as a recurring theme in post-Soviet photography

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

In some places, the tower block has never faded from view. The history of mass housing in eastern Europe is complex and uncomfortable. Yet what’s striking is how prominently the tower block features in the work of contemporary photographers from that territory. These artists have every reason to turn their backs on such buildings. They’re ugly and overbearing, not to say reminiscent of an authoritarian past. But the mass housing block is a recurring presence in their work.

Writer and critic Ekow Eshun provides a beautiful overview of the tower block as a recurring architectural, social, and aesthetic theme in the works of post-Soviet-era photographers in Russia, Serbia, the Baltic states, and throughout Eastern Europe.

"However ugly and monolithic such buildings were after all, they provided homes for people and are worth time and scrutiny as sites of possibility and connection," Ekow writes. "They were places where people gathered to sleep and eat, to argue and to raise families. And they continue to be so. Perhaps this is a modest artistic aim. But it’s also a worthwhile one."

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.

Ryugyong and beyond: visiting Pyongyang's tourist hotels

2018-02-06T13:42:00-05:00

To suggest that its quarter-of-a-century presence in the rapidly expanding Pyongyang skyline merits the international mockery it has received—fatalistically nicknamed the “hotel of doom” by Western journalists, labeled an architectural sin, and deemed the biggest mystery in Pyongyang—would consign Ryugyong to the realm of compulsive political affect ranging from imaginative resentment to the very policies governing U.S.-North Korean relations since American involvement in the Korean War.

Jake Valente's piece for Failed Architecture takes a closer look at the small number of Pyongyang tourist hotels that visitors to North Korea's capital are constricted to. "When traveling to Pyongyang, one chooses between the Yanggakdo, Koryo, Sosan, Pothonggang, Haebangsan, Pyongyang, Ryanggang, and Youth Hotel, the eight hotels currently hosting foreigners."

Moscow's new Avant-Garde Museum opens to the public

2017-07-14T17:22:00-04:00

As government officials in Moscow earmark Constructivist buildings for demolition in a massive project to relocate up to 1.6 million of the city’s residents, a non-profit museum dedicated to preserving Russia’s avant-garde architecture has opened in the Shabolovka neighbourhood.

The new Avant-Garde Museum is located in Na Shabolovke Gallery, which is a part of Khavsko-Shabolovsky housing complex built in the late 1920s by the rationalist Asnova (Association of New Architects). It is part of a district with a rich heritage of early Soviet architecture and design, dominated by the famous hyperboloid Shukhov radio tower. Supported by private grants and volunteers, the museums features photographs, video footage, archaeological fragments, archival materials, blueprints, salvaged interior fittings such as door handle, and tools belonging to the tower's visionary engineer, Vladimir Shukov.

"The idea for the space came from the local historian and activist Ilya Malcow, who has spent years collecting artifacts of the area—many of which are now on show at the museum. The neighborhood is unique, he says, because it was built virtually from scratch after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 to house workers for the new factories and institutions.

Photo by Olga Alexeyenk...

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?"