Pic of the Day: Strange Soviet Architecture

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Wedding Palace (Tbilisi, Georgia, 1985) © Frederic Chaubin

Frederic Chaubin, Cambodian born French-Spanish editor of Citizen K magazine, spent a good part of the 1980s documenting the outlandish, sci-fi architecture behind the Iron Curtain. Though many Western architects also conceptualized utopian cities and monolithic structures, most of those designs were never built. More retro-futuristic buildings after the jump.

“Roads Ministry” (Tbilisi, Georgia, 1975) © Frederic Chaubin

According to Storefront for Art and Architecture, one of our favorite local purveyors of all that is holy and edificial:

The subjects of Chaubin’s photographs, scattered throughout Armenia, Estonia, Georgia, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine and Russia, were all constructed during the last two decades of the Soviet era. Very few of their designers achieved anything more than local recognition, and until now these buildings have never been collectively documented or exhibited. The authors of many works remain unknown, and some have been destroyed since Chaubin’s photographs were taken. Concieved and executed during a moment of historical transition, they constitute one of the most surprising and least known legacies of the former USSR.

Soviet Palace (Kalinigrad, Russia, 1975) © Frederic Chaubin

“Druzhba Holiday Center Hall” (Yalta, Ukraine, designed by Igor Vasilevsky 1984) © Frederic Chaubin

Via Grain Edit.