Monumental

I've just received a massive book: Cosmic Communist Constructions Photographed: basically an architecture-porn tome of the most bonkers and brilliant modernist buildings you'll ever see.

The USSR wasn't all purges, executions and bread queues: there was an optimistic side to the People's Revolution (see also Spufford's novel Red Plenty, though admittedly it was submerged in grey concrete and misery for long periods (thanks to Stalin's perversion of Communism, but that's a rant for another day). Modernism and progressive politics once went hand-in-hand, until lack of money and imagination, coupled with poor-quality materials, produced the horrid hutches beloved both of East German commissars and British municipal housing officers. But there was a window in which People's Palaces and amenities were made with the very latest materials (to show how modern the USSR was), which meant concrete, allowing buildings to branch out, swoop and swerve. What a shame that concrete ages so badly and the building standards weren't great. But the architecture was often magnificent.

Here's the Druzhba Sanatorium in Ukraine - once mistaken by the Pentagon for a launch-pad: rooms now available.

If you've acquired a taste for architecture-as-politics and vice versa, you really need to read Owen Hatherley's books and blog. He hates what property developers and Blairite bullshitters have done to our notions of architecture and public space. 

Footnotes from history

One of the cultural things we did in Wroclaw was to visit the Panorama. Inside a fairly bold concrete building was a huge (15 metres high, 120 metre long) painting, cunningly blended with a real foreground. The subject was a battle near Wroclaw (Raclawicka) between Russia and the Polish rebels, led by Kozciuszko (pretty much the only battle the Poles won against anybody for several hundred years - and they lost the war). I'd heard of him in relation to the American War of Independence but didn't know anything about his fight for a free Poland. He was a cool guy and we should all hail him!

But this panorama had a fascinating history which was rather glossed over. Painted in the 1890s, it was stored by the Soviet regime for years after WWII, before being finally put on display in 1985. I can understand why the Russian-dominated USSR/allies wouldn't want to encourage Poles to visit a display of nationalist, anti-Russian pride. What I'd like to know more about is the decision-making process leading to the reversal of this policy. Poland was under martial law from 1981-1983 following the deviationist-nationalist activites of Solidarity. Was the decision to display the panorama a concession to Polish nationalists to placate them, or did it signify recognition in government circles that to survive they needed to disassociate themselves from the USSR?