[Image: ©Frederic Chaubin, Wedding Palace (Tbilisi, Georgia, 1985). Last month, PingMag ran a short interview with photographer Frederic Chaubin. Chaubin has spent the last several years documenting Soviet-era architecture in post-Soviet nations, with a focus on the odd, the unique, and the eccentric. “If you see the photographs all together in a small space like here, you might feel like there are quite a lot of these buildings around, but actually there are very few of them. You have to imagine that if you go to each Russian town you will only find one or two very special buildings there. But most of them are very boring and look very similar, and those here are the exceptions.” I just like the above building, really].
It would certainly make for a much nicer “modern” cathedral than, say, Our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles. (Have you visited it yet, Geoff?)
I’ve driven past it a few times – haven’t gone in yet, though.
More on cathedrals soon…
There’s actually more to common Soviet Architecture than most people think.
It typically has a bad reputation due to the fact that the citizens are sick of their “cold and lifeless” brutalist style. In fact, Russian architects in the 60s abandoned all traditions when trying to create the true image of Utopia. Most residential buildings in St. Petersburg built during the Brezhnyev era contain an unfathomable amount of creative thinking within them.