You see, it's just a concrete building, and yet we know straight away that it comes from Eastern Europe. It's insance. When you look at a video with car accidents or people dancing in Abibas jogging, it's always in this kind of setting.
It's just the craziest stuffs from the ex URSS that come out, never something positive. Yes but at the same time, when you live in this context, in this repetition of ugly buildings, It must be hard mentally speaking. If you are a society that don't care at all of the urban area in which people lives, with this basic architecture that is merely practical.
Obviously, that generates social disruption. Yeah, you're right, but that doesn't explain everything. There are people who like this kind of architecture.
And then, it's not like that for no reason either. You know what ? I think that to complete the landscape, someone is missing.
Post-Soviet landscapes have some kind of paradoxical appeal. What sound like monotony for some, others are fascinated by by its strange appearance, which is post-apocalyptic and visionary in many cases. The melancholy of these landscapes, which is nevertheless specific to Eastern Europe, resonates throughout the world.
And one of the main culprits is the doomer. The doomer, as a character, was initially part of the Wojak meme series. They were used to laugh at different generations.
From disconnected boomers to the infantilized Generation Z. The doomer is a young man in in his twenties with dark circles around his eyes, a cigarette in the mouth and a vacant look in the absurdity of existence. It's not a surprise that he became a full character, around which a whole aesthetics of a generation stuck between the failure of the past and the instability of the present was created.
The compilations of melancholic music from late USSR on a night scenery background of endless concrete buildings get millions of views. And the comments, in all languages of the world, share their existential sadness in a sort of collective therapy. And the landscape is as a protagonist than the character.
The Belarusian group Molchat Doma, which went viral on TikTok, is symbolic of this interest for the post-Soviet culture. And the cover of their album Etazhi, a hotel in Slovakia, a brutalist monster defying gravity and symbolizing that kind of fatalism weighing from the East, depicts the architectural equivalent of their music. Generally, architecture and landscape that it generates are highly political creations, whether they are ideological or pragmatic, they are the powerful testimony of the society that produced them.
These monochrome concrete blocks say it all on the context where they were born, but if they are mainly built during the 60s and 70s decades, they were imaginated longer ago. In 1917, the Bolsheviks overthrow Tsarist Russia to set up a socialist regime. And according to Marx, who wrote these theses which motivate revolutionaries, the social environment determines individual consciousness.
By producing a set of collective representations, which he calls “ideology”. So, if the Bolsheviks want to build a new society, freed from bourgeois influence, it is on their living environment where their first efforts should be put. The constructions of the past are bourgeois, therefore counter-revolutionary, and are redistributed to the community.
Religion being the opium of the masses, the same goes for religious heritage, like the Cathedral of Christ The Saviour, in Moscow, blasted while people were singing the Internationale, in which we can hear “Let’s make a clean slate of the past. ” This destructive wave allows the rise of rather modern ideas. Artists and architects claiming to be constructivist, a Russian avant-garde artistic movement deeply rooted in communist ideology, reject past ideas and invent revolutionary forms.
The desire to create a new architecture thanks to the new materials like concrete, glass and steel, the perfect match between shape and function of buildings, geometric purity and the absence of unnecessary decorative parts are the new characteristics. The seed of Soviet modernism was planted, but would only really sprout half a century later. This surge of innovation will have a short life.
In 1932, Joseph Stalin required a strict state organization to artistic professions. Therefore, any form of avant-garde movements were quickly annihilated. The Little Father of The People opted for neoclassicism and its imperial forms.
Palaces inpired by Italian renaissance, baroque metro stations, where gods and emperors were replaced by soldiers and workers, grand neoclassical boulevards, nothing can stop this love for the grandiose that was shared with other totalitarian state of the time. After the Second World War, the USSR was a ruin, but that did not cut off the desire of the prestigious historicist architecture. On the contrary, that created a new motive.
The victorious people quicky becam the topic of all the statues and mosaics decorating Moscow. The Palace of the Soviets project that was even criticized by western architects for being too bourgeois, the skyscrapers nicknamed the Seven Sisters of Moscow and the buildings for high-ranking people which today are among the the most popular apartments in the capital city, this is the heritage of the post-war period. And yet, there is a lack of accomodation.
The war destroyed 1700 towns and more than 70,000 villages. 25 million are now homeless in a country in the midst of an urban transition. Accessible housing was one of the key points of 1917 revolutionaries, and yet when Staline died in 1953, the majority of the population was still squeezed in wooden huts or in shared apartments, the famous kommunalka.
His successor, Nikita Khrushchev, had the heavy task of accommodate the growing population. The new secretary of the party opted for a de-Stalinization, and architecture was no exception. No more references to antique elements and outrageous decorations.
It is time to provide a pragmatic and modern answer to the housing crisis. The mass industrial production was inspired by international prefabrication methods. That is at that moment that the greatest symbol of Soviet architecture appeared.
The Khrushchevka. Give me the piece that goes there. There it is.
No, not this one, the other one. Uh. .
. OK. The Khrushchevka is the typical housing building.
It was built in the 1960s during the mandate of the eponymous secretary. It's the result of a decade of research in engineering whose stated objective was to build quickly and at low cost. By relying on prefabrication methods, the design of these buildings are highly optimized and standardized.
Concrete or less commonly brick panels are manufactured in a factory, then carried on side with a truck and few workers were needed to put the elements together. As elevators are too expensive and too long to install, buildings are generally four floors high. The apartments are small, 16 to 40 m², in which we can often see three generations of the same family being accomodated.
The kitchen is generally 6m², but the applicances are modern. The 2m² bathroom is also pre-assembled and ready to be connected to the piping. The central heating, the gas stove and the balcony are standard.
The Khrushchevka will evolve during the following term, that of Leonid Brezhnev. The Brezhnevka, well done you follow, will lead to better quality, durability and height thanks to to the elevators. Because in fact, the building models are declined in series, the most typical being the K-7 model representing just by itself 10% of the real estate area of the USSR.
Hundreds of thousands of copies will be built throughout the Soviet territory in 7 years. The Khrushchevka and the Brezhnevka are the raw result of the functionalist thinking in architecture which advocates a perfect balance between form and function of buildings. And indeed, the repetition of prefabricated elements which makes the identity of these bars of buildings.
There is a brutal consequence from this mass construction on a continental scale, it creates a characteristic landscape of the Soviet era, that is to say mediocre and sadly uniform bars of buildings, from East to West. And that's all the paradox of the bars of modern housing, in Russia and elsewhere. the Khrushchevkas were a true social revolution, considerably improving the living conditions and offering millions poorly housed people a cramped housing indeed, but worthy and equipped with modern appliances.
Only these buildings were meant to be temporary, designed to be built quickly and at low cost to resolve the serious housing crisis. But as it is often the case when money is running out, temporary has turned into permanent. This modernization of the post-Stalinist architecture is not only driven by a housing requirement.
In 1954, the thaw began, a time with less censorship that lead to a greater artistic expression period. This release of tensions was also visible in diplomacy. In the 60's, the détente leads to a better collaboration between the Eastern and Western blocks.
After the Cuban crisis, the competition between the two ideological models will be more constructive during the next 20 years. Which of the American or the Soviet housewife will have the best kitchen? Who will be the first to set foot on the moon?
The astronaut or the cosmonaut? The artistic field is also a part of this battle. In 1954, the directives adopted during the All-Union Conference of Builders marked the end of the Stalinist neoclassicism, but brought back the hindered avant-garde ideas from of the 1920s.
Through prospective research laboratories, the Soviet architects will be encouraged to be as bold as possible to design the the most futuristic shapes, like if, in the end, the Stalinist era was no more than an interruption in the modernist project. And precisely, what is more modern than the space race? Well, I can't really see the future here.
Hold on. You haven't seen everything yet. Space was a dream for Soviet people.
Even more than the Americans who challenged the imagination through Hollywood, for the Soviets, exploring space was kind of a national idea. After all, the proletarian revolution proletarian has always had a global aim. And when we talk about the world, why should we stop at our planet?
Earth is the cradle of mankind. But we don't spend our whole life in a cradle, wrote the father of cosmonautics, Constantine Tsiolkovsky, and the proletarian poets began to sing the idea of Red Mars even before the television was colored in the country. Artists, as much as scientists, were convinced that life in space was an inevitable step of human evolution, and this dream has colonized Soviet popular culture.
Films, novels, works of art, but also literary and scientific magazines in which artists invent an enthusiastic iconography of exploration technologies. Tapered interiors, spherical colonies and toroidal stations are the imagined shapes for the cosmic civilization to become. So, to welcome the future as it should, it was to be built now.
Building today as if tomorrow was already here became a requirement. As if the new man, freed from the past, already inhabited these spaces. And then under the combined influence of the Marxist revival and the progress in the space race, the Soviet architecture became in the 60s a prospective construction exercice of a society of the future.
It is therefore from this repeated bars of buildings landscape that strange anomalies appeared. Raw and expressive structures with a retrofuturistic aesthetic. As a space civilization left on Earth.
Starships, galactic communication antennas, planetary defence citadels, techno-occultism consecrated temples Of course, all the post-Stalinist architecture is not only inspired by this futuristic imagination. And yet, there is a family likeness between space habitat concepts, the Khrushchevkas and the monuments of Soviet modernism. In a sense, all these shapes come from the same mold.
And this mold is maybe less the communist idealogy than the spirit of the times, the spirit of an era, which share the two enemy blocks. A materialist era that relates to technical progress rather than God. To say the least, the spatial architecture is extremely constrained.
The artificial gravity generated by centrifugal force, the optimum between surface of habitat and atmospheric pressure, are the main physical constraints that guide futuristic orbital colonies concepts. Another technical constraint is that space architecture must be modular. Because of compatibility, assembly and industrial production.
In conclusion, two processes of design reigns in spatial architecture, the function that dictates shape and modularity. But the architects did not wait for humanity to set foot in space to address these problems. Indeed, international modern architecture is at this time spanned by several style currents which feed each other and which try to define the new relation between aesthetics and industrial mode of production.
And these two main currents are functionalism and brutalism. Functionalist thinking is often presented by the adage, form follows function. It states that the appearance of architecture must be both arising from the construction process and the ordinary use of the building.
The ornamentation is considered useless, even immoral. For example, see this spectacular Drujba rest center? Well, we guess it is the result of two constraints.
On the one hand, the minimization of the footprint on the Yalta natural park in order to reduced the impact on the site. On the other hand, the desire to offer to each occupant a similar view on the Black Sea, everyone being in the same boat. There, on this facade of the Minsk architecture faculty, we can easily see the succession of workshop rooms.
What you see there is the diagonal pileup of amphitheaters which complete the linearity of the building. This space organization is clear and transparent from the outside, it thus exudes a certain elegance. As for brutalism, it is an architectural trend which make use of the violent aesthetic of raw concrete in its wild and primitive dimension.
It takes advantage of the repetition and variation of concrete units to express their motive. And here again, the ornamentation is discarded in favor of massiveness. What you see there is not a citadel of Mordor, but the Russian State Scientific Center for Robotics and Technical Cybernetics in Leningrad of which only two repeated concrete units make up this concrete pleated skirt.
And for these accommodations that we can observe from East to West of the Soviet Bloc, the repetition of windows and balconies make the facade vibrate. So, functionalism and brutalism are the practical aesthetics of modern architecture dictated by common sense and industrial processes. And if there are huge differences in means and objectives, the Soviet modernism, the Krushchevkas and the space architecture concepts follow all three the ruthless rules of a productivist logic.
Singular vestige of a failed utopia, the constructions left over from the Soviet era are still there as much because of the most mediocre conformism than the most daring avant-garde ideas. Composing a single landscape, a singular and same cold and disturbing identity. Today, the legacy of brutalism divides opinion.
The buildings are getting old and the raw concrete keeps on it all marks of passing time. Their initial appearance is expensive to maintain and the current discussions on sustainability raise questions on the ecological impact of concrete. But above all things, people are polarized by its aesthetics.
Its stubborn austerity no longer evokes anything radical. And while art lovers are outrageing about the lack of preservation of these masterpieces, public often finds them unsightly and would like to see them disappear. In many minds, brutalism is associated with totalitarianism, such buildings being used as settings in threatening dystopian movies does not help.
Their qualities are also their faults, their shapes, different from the national architectures, uproots them, their monumentality is scary. Just like the Soviet project, brutalism seems more and more to be a vestige of the past century. Perfect impersonation of a Kaiju monster.
No, run away, run away! Please, I have children! Homo sovieticus is dead leaving behind him the vestiges of its civilization.
And the new inhabitants who wander in the labyrinths of aging concrete fill them with new meanings. Prefabricated buildings are the new Russian bucolic landscape. And while the yesteryear artists were painting the wooded villages, the Khrushchevka is in the minds of a new generation of creators.
The romantic melancholy of Dostoyevsky's books has well merged with what the Russian writer Vladimir Sorokin described as the Russian grotesque. For writers, Russia is, of course, a huge Eldorado. But for citizens, it's a rather difficult ordeal.
Imagine what would happen if I had been born, for example, in Switzerland. I should have invent something, read criminal chronicles, take hard drugs. Here to dive into the metaphysic abyss, I just go out into the street.
But the doomer has not lost all hope. And on the Russian segment of the Internet, the landscape that only evokes sadness and poverty for some becomes a source of comfort for others. As it is difficult to make a difference between a block of buildings from another, each photo reminds to the person who watch it the place of their carefree childhood, their birthplace, their family warmth.
Buildings designed to be temporary until the impending arrival of communism have become permanent. And we learned to love our home, in all its imperfection. The ruins of a cosmic civilization from the past are filled with new meanings.
And now, many of them are perhaps the key to understand where they come from and what is their place in the world. Before thinking about destroying all these buildings, we have to seriously ask ourselves about the value of their heritage. Because, whether we want it or not, this brutalist modernism is a part of the Russian history.
And not just of Russians. It’s also ours. In France, one of the precursors of this trend is the famous Le Corbusier.
And this tutelary figure of Le Corbu single-handedly polarizes all debates on modern architecture, as if he were its only father, which is not the case at all. He is considered the genius of modernity by some, and like the gravedigger of beauty by others. To say that this is reductive would be an understatement.
And it's high time today to have a peaceful discourse on brutalism. So rather than shaving the entirety of a past that we despise, you have to do this recognition work and sort the most interesting buildings, make some avant-garde experiments, renovate them, rehabilitate them, requalify them. This brutalism, which Le Corbusier said from it it was the romanticism for those who felt under the weather.
Today, we must neither despise it nor glorify it. We must understand it, we must accept it and make the best of it.
