Power structure: why the architecture of the eastern bloc still looms large after communism — The Calvert Journal
▻http://www.calvertjournal.com/features/show/4036
Looking back at it, I’ve been photographing architecture pretty much since my first black-and-white film roll at college. The first semi-amateur photo exhibit I put up consisted of studies of French Gothic cathedrals and pre-historic megaliths.
Growing up in Vyborg, formerly the second-largest city in Finland, which became Soviet territory after the Second World War, I couldn’t help but notice the differences between buildings and districts from the two eras. They clearly spoke different architectural languages, or, if you will, transmitted and implied different states of mind. Vyborg is layered from the medieval castle at its heart out through the old city to the panel housing at its outer limits. But the layer that has always caught my attention was somewhere in the middle — the slender and bare architecture of the 1920s and 30s, the Finnish functionalism.
The juxtapositions you find in Vyborg help you grasp the idea of multiple, simultaneous, politically defined modernities. Soviet modernism in this sense is a part of a larger architectural puzzle. Yet it is especially interesting because ideology, by twisting and fermenting itself within the architecture, has taken on some very curious forms. One of them in Russia is called the spetsobjekt, or “special object” — a factory, research institute, or any utilitarian facility vaguely related to military needs or to some shady branch of law enforcement. This was my main subject in BLOC. A spetsobjekt is a fenced-off compound that may have completely lost its practical or technological relevance, yet nobody is in a hurry to remove the security regime around it. These shells of secrecy with no content inside them are a very prominent feature of the post-Soviet city.
