Witnesses of a Future Non-Coming How a French Photographer Spurred Public Interest in Soviet Architecture

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

They are very close to us - witnesses of a future that has not come, powerful, heading into the heavens, dilapidated temples of Soviet futurism. Hidden in the shadows of everyday life, deserted and forgotten, they patiently wait to be demolished to be replaced by shining shopping malls. The project "USSR" by Frédéric Schoban is dedicated to the Soviet legacy that is worth remembering - the architecture of the "space age".

In 2003, French photographer Frederic Chaubin, editor of the authoritative publication Citizen K, came to Tbilisi. He planned to interview Eduard Shevardnadze, but decided to devote time to exploring the city, plunge into the atmosphere of Georgia - and therefore went to the flea market. Among the rubble of second-hand books, he suddenly saw an album about the architecture of the 70s, published in Russian. Shoban was attracted by the title, although the cover was dusty and completely featureless. And then he was struck by the photographs in the album - he could not even imagine that in the USSR, in addition to budget "panels", something similar was being erected.

Trying to translate the inscriptions under the photographs, Shobin learned that several of these fantastic buildings are located right here in Tbilisi. He made inquiries and after a couple of hours, frame by frame, he was filming the building of the Ministry of Highways of the Georgian SSR - a titanic through structure, like a fragment of a frame or the skeleton of something even more majestic.

This was the beginning of Frederick Schauban's photo-dissertation on the countries of the former USSR, which lasted seven years. The book, published as a result of this strange journey, was immediately translated into several languages and sold around the world in tens of thousands of copies. It includes about a hundred photographs of buildings from the last years of the existence of the Soviet Union. And it is also called "USSR" - Cosmic Communist Consructions Photographed.

Shobain was no stranger to travel - from childhood he lived between several countries, observing the contacts and interpenetration of different cultures. He was born in Cambodia, lived part of his life in Paris, and his parents - French and Spanish - taught him to be attentive to someone else's historical heritage. In an interview, he said that the former Soviet republics are the most exotic countries he has visited.

Modernist architecture in the USSR, of course, appeared much earlier - back in the 1920s, in the projects of Ginzburg and Melnikov, but rather quickly it was replaced by the pompous "Stalinist Empire" style, and only after debunking the personality cult of Stalin did the architects get the opportunity to realize their ideas. But mostly on paper - entire design bureaus worked to make more and more inexpensive and compact housing, the same type of "Khrushchev".

At the end of the great era in the capitals of the republics, the pressure on architects was somewhat less - and at the same time, officials wanted to show that the republics live no worse than the capital, that they have something to boast of before the party leadership from Moscow. Success in conquering space also contributed - and hotels, houses of culture and sports complexes with names like "Cosmos" or "Sputnik" and futuristic outlines appeared. The futuristic architecture of the late USSR has neither a single style, nor, as they say, schools - these are very individualized projects, each of which interprets in its own way either cosmic motives, or references to medieval temple architecture, or themes of national identity.

It was the buildings of those years that Frédéric Schaubin explored in his grandiose photo project. Despite the emergency state of most of them, associated both with attempts to reduce the cost of construction initially, and with the abandonment, desolation of the post-Soviet period, they still make an amazing impression. Schaubin sought to emphasize their power, their expression, paying tribute to the flight of imagination of their creators. He wanted to destroy the idea of life in the post-Soviet space as gray, devoid of creative impulse, and to show its cultural potential.

Shobain conducted a kind of experiments, showing the inhabitants of the cities where he was shooting photographs of old futuristic buildings located literally around the next bend. People seemed to have not seen them - or preferred not to notice, as an unpleasant memory of the years of totalitarianism and stagnation. Shobain's interest in these dilapidated buildings seemed strange to them. But the architects-futurists, whom Chaubin was able to find, were moved by his attention. The photographer himself repeated that he seemed to have found an ancient lost city …

The work on the photo project - a kind of study of the aesthetics of Soviet futuristic architecture - became for Shobin in its own way mystical. He found stately buildings that others believed to have been destroyed long ago or were completely unaware of their existence. But often he found out that he was late, and the building was just recently razed to the ground …

It is believed that Shoban's project to a certain extent influenced the interest of the younger generation of creative personalities in the culture of a country in which they have never lived, but whose legacy they encounter on a daily basis. Against the background of the buildings filmed by Shobin, clips are shot by fashionable performers dressed in sets from another "singer of a bygone era" - Gosha Rubchinsky.

After the release of the album "USSR", several exhibitions of Soviet modernist architecture were organized, Russian and foreign authoritative publications began to write about it, various research and creative projects began to appear - documentaries, art spaces, travel guides … heritage. The same building of the Ministry of Highways in Tbilisi in 2007 was recognized as a national architectural monument in accordance with the laws on the protection of architectural monuments (although its restoration was postponed indefinitely). In Estonia and Lithuania, work is underway to include the futuristic buildings of the Soviet period in the list of architectural monuments.