17.04.2025, Moscow.
Architecture of the 1970s–1980s in the “totalitarian” USSR achieved a degree of freedom that was unattainable in the West, stated French architecture researcher and author of the cult album CCCP: Cosmic Communism Construction Photographed, Frédéric Chaubin, in an interview with The Essence of Time newspaper .
According to Chaubin, in the late Soviet Union, unlike Western countries, there were no constraints imposed by brutal competition in the construction market. And in the late USSR, architects had more opportunities for real creative realization than their Western counterparts.
Soviet architects “were searching for new formal and spiritual paths <…> It is somehow paradoxical but I believe that in the late 1970’s and 1980’s, the eroding of the centralized soviet power <…> ended up in opening free spaces that didn’t exist in the West; some creative opportunities that western architects didn’t manage to get because of the framing constraints of private sector and real estate,” the researcher believes.
As a result, Chaubin notes, incredible “cosmic” buildings appeared throughout the USSR — structures that are completely original and have no analogues anywhere in the world.
“Of course, you can call it “modernism” or, to be more precise, qualify in such a way some of the buildings from the late 1970s, but I was personally more attracted by the 1980s post-modernist ones or, in some extent, the more extreme ones, that I would dare to call neo-expressionist. If you consider Vladimir Somov’s drama theatre in Velikiy Novgorod or Romualdas Šilinskas’ sanatorium in Druskininkai – you’re dealing with achievements that get beyond modernism,” said Chaubin.
Source: Rossa Primavera News Agency
