Between the Clock and the Bed.

Since the contested election in Belarus, I've been riveted, as perpetually fascinated by these European locales. In watching coverage of the protests, as well as a few older documentaries, it finally occurred to me that Minsk (where I passed through during USSR times but didn't stop) retains so very much of that old Soviet feel that it's uncanny.

In short, always be suspicious of perfectly clean urban areas. They're more Disney-fied than real, and usually for all the wrong reasons (and I'm no fan of Uncle Walt, mind you).

Imagine my delight in this ...

Minsk: Owen Hatherley on the world's most complete, and most surprising Soviet city (The Calvert Journal)

Whether hostile or complimentary, all accounts of Belarus will mention the extreme Sovietness of its capital, the equally extreme cleanliness and lack of commercial pollution and/or vibrancy. This leads to some interesting errors. Historian Andrew Wilson, in his otherwise convincing critique of the Lukashenko regime, The Last European Dictatorship, describes its dominant style erroneously as Brutalist. Nothing could be further from the truth. Minsk is arguably the greatest neoclassical European city of the 20th century, with most buildings in the city centre resplendent with colonnades, baroque archways and romantic skylines of spires, obelisks and heroic sculptures, all on an axial plan integrated with landscaped parklands around the river Svisloch. This is the direct result of one of the least known episodes of the Second World War — the intensity of resistance in Soviet Belarus to the Third Reich. It deserves to be as well known as that of Poland or Yugoslavia, but isn’t, largely because it isn’t useful to anybody much, save perhaps Lukashenko’s unpleasant government.

... and by extension, this.

Melancholy of obsolete futures at (The Critic)

Alexander Adams on Soviet Brutalism and where to read about it

Brutalism has seen a surge in interest among young people keen on bold uncompromising Modernist design. Whole books of moody photographic studies of concrete buildings are snapped up by fans of urban life and retro design. A crop of new books explores the Brutalism of socialist states.

While Constructivism and avant-gardism in fine art came to prominence during the October Revolution, it was suppressed in favour of Socialist Realism by the mid-1930s. In architecture more adventurous forms and materials persisted, although in the minority. Under Stalin there was a degree of stylistic conformity and austerity, yet adventurous architecture was not seen as “bourgeois formalism” as it was in art. Following the death of Stalin in 1953, historicism receded and a greater variety of art, design and architecture (including Modernist architecture) became possible.

While supposedly for the masses, many of the showpiece constructions were moribund from the start: inverted ziggurat hotels that were barely occupied and shopping centres with few consumer goods to offer. Much of this architecture was completed less than a decade before the economic and political collapse of the Eastern Bloc.

In postcards, gargantuan apartment buildings — veritable terrestrial ocean liners — tower over public spaces, making farm-near-me/">miniatures of two-tone buses and Trabants. Third-Worldism (also called the Non-Aligned Movement) was a political position of the mid-century decades that apparently offered advantages of alliance to states that pledged to remain equidistant between socialism and democratic capitalism. In practice, most post-colonial states in Africa, South America and South Asia following Third-Worldism did turn to the two superpowers, which provided strategic assistance in return for favourable trading status or military co-operation, thus forming indirect and unstated alliances rather than outright ones.

These are the books described in the article. I can't afford to buy them all, but I wish it were possible. Come to think of it, I just might, anyway.

Consumer Culture Landscapes in Socialist Yugoslavia – Lidija Butković Mićin, Nataša Bodrožić, Saša Šimpraga
East German Modern – Hans Engels
Imagine Moscow – Deyan Sudjic, Jean-Louis Cohen, and Richard Anderson
Soviet Metro Stations – Christopher Herwig
Architecture in Global Socialism – Łukasz Stanek

Learning to love examples of architectural Modernism and Brutalism, and lamenting a missed opportunity to emulate Kaliningrad.

All the way back in 2014, I had a stunning Brutalist vision for our municipal overlords.

From Königsberg to Kaliningrad, but not back again, though maybe ...

The building to the rear, which never has been used, testifies to the vitality of one-party rule. Give Floyd County Democrats a chance to copy it, and it will be standing where the Reisz building is now.

Alas, they're far more brutal as bribe-engorged political hacks than architectural thinkers. It must be something in the water(y beer). Just imagine if Kaliningrad's unfinished House of the Soviets inspired Jeff Gahan's House of the Anchors. 

Ah, but I digress and proffer an apology to Brutalists who are sure to express outrage at being compared with New Albany's "Mayor for the Eternal TIF."

21 ‘Ugly’ Buildings That Aren’t Ugly at All, by Eric Grundhauser

Atlas Obscura readers share their love for specific structures they feel have been unfairly maligned.

IT’S EASY TO PUT TOGETHER collections of beautiful, soaring buildings that perfectly encapsulate today’s hottest architectural trends. But who will speak for the edifices that have gone largely out of favor since they were first constructed? The imposing behemoths and the strangely angled stars of yesteryear’s design fads? Atlas Obscura readers, that’s who. We recently asked members of our community to tell us about the “ugly” buildings they love, and you weren’t shy in sharing your appreciation for your favorite misunderstood structures.

While the style certainly doesn’t have a monopoly on unconventionally attractive architecture, the majority of the responses we received pointed to brutalist institutional buildings—especially those featured on college campuses. But overall, what all of your nominees ultimately have in common is a way of inspiring devotion in spite of (or sometimes because of) the way they appear on the outside ...

A sad story from Scotland:

Modernist ruin is an 'albatross around our neck' says church (BBC)

St Peter's Seminary in Cardross, near Dumbarton, was built in 1966 as a training college for priests.

It was once described as a "modernist masterpiece" but closed in the 1970s and lay empty until a plan emerged to turn it into a cultural centre.

However, that plan was shelved and the building is now set to remain a ruin.

Speaking personally, I've developed a liking for certain examples of Brutalism, some of which are just as deserving of preservation on grounds of "history" as the usual examples preferred locally. Personal evolution. Imagine THAT. 

---

Related:

Brutalism: If we're intent on spending $10,000,000 ... might as well make it interesting.

1987 European Summer: "Skopje, capital city of Macedonia, is a dream world for lovers of cosmic concrete communist-era architecture."

But Black Sabbath: "Britain's Second City Fights to Save Its Brutalist Architecture."

More brutalism in sclerotic thinking than architecture, at least in Nawbony.

Mapping Skopje's modernism inadvertently leads to a valuable lesson about New Albanian "set design."

Regular readers are familiar with my offbeat obsessions, among them the pros and cons of Modernist architecture. In this article, the architectural intersects with the European ... the Balkan, no less.

Big time sweet spot. Here's the link, followed by some background.

Mapping Skopje’s Modernism, by Feargus O'Sullivan (CityLab)

An earthquake hit the city in July 1963, killing over 1,000 people and leaving 200,000 homeless. The inventive, vernacular-influenced designs behind the rebuild are worth celebrating.

Skopje, one of Europe’s lesser known capitals, is an unlikely battleground for an internationally debated architectural clash. In recent years, the capital of what is still (but may not for long be) called the Republic of Macedonia has developed some notoriety as the location of a new set of extremely bombastic, neo-historicist buildings and monuments that supposedly pay tribute to a hazy and heavily contested regional past. As a new publication points out, however, this steroidal historicism is only part of the city’s architectural story.

It wasn't until the summer of 2017, when viewing my long-lost slides from 1987, that I finally fathomed the intended pattern of those buildings I saw in Skopje. 

1987 European Summer: "Skopje, capital city of Macedonia, is a dream world for lovers of cosmic concrete communist-era architecture."

My visit to Skopje in 1987 was purely accidental, but it made a deep impression.

30 years ago today (May, 1987): Five days in Skopje with the greatest seismologist of them all.

Returning to O'Sullivan's essay, he references a phenomenon I've written about on a regular basis, wherein local governments eager to coordinate all aspects of construction and "beautification" projects in which they've chosen to initiate and/or partner (using public money), invariably prefer artificial design templates of dubious aesthetic value, ones more appropriate to the plasticity of Disney theme parks than varied urban settings.

Precisely, writes O'Sullivan; this same impulse has impelled Skopje's city fathers to construct grandiose replicas of buildings that never existed rather than honor their specific cultural legacy -- which even the detested Brutalists managed to do amid Communism after the earthquake.

Consequently, I've seldom seen it expressed better than O'Sullivan does in this passage. Replace his "Mussolini-era" with my "Disneyesque," and voila -- all my critiques of New Albanian government-imposed design flaws in a nutshell.

These new buildings seem less inspired by architecture than set design, an aspiration underlined by the government’s yen for recladding many modernist survivals with neoclassical details so that they look like housing projects dressed up as Mussolini-era stations for Halloween.

"Set design."

That's it.

Red has-beens and Reisz: "Seeing the beauty in Ukraine’s Soviet architecture."

Perhaps the single most noteworthy fact to emerge from the recent Reisz Mahal city hall relocation boondoggle was councilman David Barksdale's enduringly bizarre assertion that government employees in an air-conditioned, electrified and fully plumbed building younger than him are being forced to endure "inhumane" working conditions.

That's a special kind of stupid, so let's move to the second most interesting fact, which pertains to the City-County Building itself.

The courthouse is undoubtedly modern, but at 57 years old it’s actually eligible to be listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Preservationists routinely plead that their overarching goal is not to recreate century-old streetscapes in the sense of Disney-fried fantasy, and there is occasional merit to their protests.

Well, at least for some of them.

Barksdale's cost-be-damned Reisz fetish has marginalized the local historic preservation cadre so thoroughly that its only hope is the elevation of Jeff Gahan as mayor-for-life; any other result in next year's mayoral race stands to be grim for a group that has leaped full-bore into grubby partisan politics in spite of its rumored non-profit, apolitical status.

Returning to the wider scene, where the proverbial rubber ultimately will meet the road is the projected future juncture of preservation-mindedness and structures precisely like the current City-County Building.

We'll be watching. I suspect it won't happen in Barksdale's time, but maybe Generation Z will bail us out of the rampant foppery.

Seeing the Beauty in Ukraine’s Soviet Architecture, by Karim Doumar (CityLab)

The authors of an upcoming book on the nation’s most threatened buildings have a dramatic short film that makes a case for preservation.