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Baltic

ArchitectureBaltic
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PHOTO GALLERY: PAIMIO SANATORIUM

Paimio Sanatorium, located among the pine forests of southwestern Finland, is both a modernist marvel and a leading example of human-centered architecture. Completed in 1933, and based on a contest-winning design by the young husband-and-wife team of Alvar and Aino Aalto, the building was designed from the ground up as a place of healing, rest, and tranquility.
Set among the pine forests east of Paimio, a small town about thirty kilometers east of Turku, the building is surrounded by green space on all sides…

John Peck
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AbandonedArchitecture
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RUMMU ASH HILLS AND SUNKEN QUARRY

THE VILLAGE OF Rummu, in northern Estonia, is home to a geographical oddity: a lake with several offshore buildings that are partially or completely submerged, skirted by pale white hills that taper down to a gentle, beach-like incline. The lake is in fact a former limestone and marble quarry, now shut down and flooded. The site teems with plant and animal life, particularly in the summer, making it a striking blend of the idyllic and creepy – particularly given that one of the sunken buildings is a former prison that once housed the quarry’s involuntary labor source.

John Peck
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AbandonedArchitecture
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SPOMENIK MONUMENT DATABASE

SPOMENIK MONUMENT DATABASE, out this week from FUEL Publishing, chronicles the massive, brutalist war memorials spread across the former Yugoslavia. While “spomenik” simply means “memorial” in Serbo-Croatian, the word has come to be associated with the particular form these monuments took from the 1960s to the 1980s: wildly asymmetrical abstract constructions of concrete, stone and metal, often placed incongruously in remote, pastoral settings.

John Peck
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AbandonedArchitecture
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BRUTALIST ARCHITECTURE OF TALLINN

THE COMMUNIST GOVERNMENTS in both the Baltics and Yugoslavia went on a spree of monument-building in the decades after WWII, which, when the ruling paradigms collapsed in the early 1990s, became fraught symbols of a tangled past in the power vacuum of the present. While some of the monuments in these regions were destroyed and others were moved or built around, most have been simply left to age themselves into obsolescence. When the material is concrete, however, the aging-out game can be a long one.

John Peck
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ArchitectureBaltic
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PHOTO GALLERY: HELSINKI NEON AND SIGNAGE

HELSINKI, WITH ITS months-long stretches containing more darkness than light, is a natural fit for neon lighting. For businesses operating in the dark winter months, neon serves as a beacon that invites customers in from the cold. In contrast to other cities, where neon often takes on splashier forms, much of Helsinki’s neon is set in orderly sans-serifs, though here and there bursts of cursive and other stylized types still break through.

John Peck
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ArchitectureBooks
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CCCP: COSMIC COMMUNIST CONSTRUCTIONS PHOTOGRAPHED

DURING THE FINAL decades of the Soviet Union, architects found themselves freer to create unconventional structures than at any point in the country’s history. This was particularly true in the republics outside Russia, where, while cursory tributes still had to be paid to overarching socialist ideals, the structures themselves took on a dizzying array of forms.

John Peck
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