Chosen as the architecture book of the year by the International Festival of Books and Films for Art in Perpignan, France, Cosmic Communist Constructions Photographed by Frédéric Chaubin explores 90 buildings across 14 former Soviet Republics. Each of these structures expresses what Chaubin considers the fourth age of Soviet architecture, an unknown flowering that took place from 1970 to 1990. Unlike the decades of the 1920s and 1950s, no "school" or main trend emerges here. These buildings represent a chaotic impulse originating from a decaying system.

Taking advantage of the collapsing monumental structure, architects surpassed modernism, either returning to roots or innovating freely. Some of the bold ones completed projects that Constructivists would dream of (Druzhba Sanatorium, Yalta), while others expressed their imagination in an expressive manner (Palace of Weddings, Tbilisi). A summer camp, inspired by sketches of a prototype lunar base, proclaims the influence of Suprematism (Prometheus Youth Camp, Bogatyr). Then comes the "speaking architecture" that spread in the last years of the USSR: a crematorium decorated with concrete flames (Crematorium, Kyiv), a technological institution with a flying saucer crashed on the roof (Institute of Scientific Research, Kyiv), a political center watching you like Big Brother (House of Soviets, Kaliningrad).

In the puzzle of their styles, with their exotic strategies, these buildings are exceptional remnants of a decaying system. In their diversity and local exoticism, they testify to both the vast geography of the USSR and the enervated life of the Soviet state, the voids in an expanding net. At the same time, they immortalize many of the ideological dreams of the country and its era, from an obsession with the universe to the reincarnation of its identity.

Pages: 312, Publication Year: 0331, Dimensions: 26x26cm