I *loved* looking at this stuff, but this is the first time I've ever felt creeped out by Soviet aesthetics in the same way that Albert Speer's works creep me out. These buildings are perverted abstractions rendered in marble and concrete, dwarfing the human interests they're supposed to be serving. The "Palace of Soviets" -- imagine the luckless citizen who'd have to go there to get a permit for some dangerous and powerful device like a flush toilet, walking up the half-mile of steps and between those Saturn-5 sized pillars. Or the clerk who lives out his life in some stuffy industrial mail-room in the guts of the building, millions of tons of stone and bureaucracy around and on top of him. I *expect* capitalist office blocks to be phallic monuments to power, ego and excess, but somehow the Soviet version is even worse for the thin veneer of humanitarianism.
Totally. Yeah, I was gonna mention... they also look just like all those Frank Lloyd Wright/Corbusian visions of the City Radiant we had in the West around the teens and twenties - which on many levels creep me out, thanks to reading Jane Jacobs et al. :>
Funny how these things translate from culture to culture. Of course, I suppose any architectural Grand Statement will have that kind of air about it, if it doesn't let anyone interact with it at a reasonable human scale.
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I *expect* capitalist office blocks to be phallic monuments to power, ego and excess, but somehow the Soviet version is even worse for the thin veneer of humanitarianism.
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Funny how these things translate from culture to culture. Of course, I suppose any architectural Grand Statement will have that kind of air about it, if it doesn't let anyone interact with it at a reasonable human scale.
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