The Glories of Socialist Architecture:
"Once the Ministry of Road Construction, this building in Tbilisi, Georgia, consists of five intersecting horizontal bars and resembles a Jenga game."
"An earthquake in 1963 gave city planners in the Macedonian capital of Skopje the chance to envision an "ideal city" in concrete."
Photographs by Roman Bezjak, from his book Socialist Modernism.
More here:
Within the photo book the individual images condense into a kind of archeology of an era, which was previously bound up with promises full of hope for the future; promises which have long since turned out to be empty ones. The Skopje central postal office or towering apartment blocks in Zagreb were supposed to make the world a better place someday – more beautiful, more wonderful. What remains today is first and foremost a plethora of questions: whether to re-use, renovate or preserve these buildings, which have for the most part been left to decay and as ruins tell the story of their glorious past. The future is uncertain. What had once been celebrated as the expression of an egalitarian collectivity is today evidence of enforced ideological conformity and foreign rule by the Soviets.
Wow, so that's where Alexei Pazhitnov got the idea for Tetris!
Posted by: Martin Adamson | October 13, 2011 at 04:26 PM