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 Calvert Journal

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? — The Guardian

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. — citylab.com

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. — Calvert Journal

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. — The Calvert Journal

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). — Hyperallergic

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. — Calvert Journal

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. — Calvert Journal

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. — calvertjournal.com

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. — theguardian.com

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. — wsj.com

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. — wired.com