On December 10, I had the pleasure to speak at the Recycling Socialism seminar at the Politecnico di Milano, part of a workshop held in collaboration with the Tallinn Architecture Biennial.

I was invited to contribute a presentation on CCCP, a book by Frédéric Chaubin, to augment the discussion of the ambiguous heritage of Soviet-era architecture.



Chaubin's photographs of architectural curiosities from around the communist world were first presented as an exhibition at Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York in 2007. In my lecture, I foregrounded these images against the predominant banality of the Soviet Union's ubiquitous khrushchyovka apartment buildings and Lenin statues—the former a theme covered in endless images and films, the latter a subject newly invigorated by the struggles of former SSRs, such as Ukraine, to negotiate newly Eurocentric identities.

See the following two videos for strong evocations of both themes!



The Lenin statue in Kiev's Bessarabska Square is pulled down on 8 December 2013 during Ukraine's Euromaidan protests


Click image to see YouTube clip

Eldar Ryazanov's 1976 film The Irony of Fate is a bleak comedy of errors based on the identical apartment buildings all over the USSR; it begins with this animation depicting the relentless march of standardised housing over the entire communist territory