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

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. — Places Journal

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 Calvert Journal

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

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. — 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

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. — Failed Architecture

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 Art Newspaper