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Brutalism

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CONCRETE SIBERIA

THE POZNAŃ-BASED publisher Zupagrafika documents Brutalist, prefab, and other concrete structures throughout Europe, focusing on their minimalist patterns and colorful flourishes. Their newest volume, Concrete Siberia, is a companion to last year’s Eastern Blocks (see our review here), focusing on Russia’s vast far north.

John Peck
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EAST GERMAN MODERN

DURING ITS FOUR-plus decades of existence, the GDR was a unique geopolitical paradox. Its place at the heart of the Cold War conflict belied the simple, day-to-day lives of the vast majority of its citizens. This paradox manifests itself visibly in the architecture of the former GDR, where often-cosmic abstract and geometric tendencies exist alongside the drab and mundane.

John Peck
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SOVIET ASIA

TOWERING CONCRETE SCULPTURES inlaid with bright tiles, Brutalist housing blocks adorned with intricate patterns: the structures of post-Soviet Central Asia are a study in east-west contrasts, and include some of the stranger relics of the Cold War era.

John Peck
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EASTERN BLOCKS: CONCRETE LANDSCAPES OF THE FORMER EASTERN BLOC

BRUTALIST ARCHITECTURE IS experiencing something of a renaissance – or at the very least, a zombified second coming. With the opening of formerly sequestered countries in the Eastern Bloc and the ease of taking and sharing digital photos, hulking tower flats and concrete curiosities have emerged from behind the Iron Curtain. In the words of the authors, “The Iron Curtain was understood in the West as The Concrete Curtain. Everything behind it was perceived as mass produced and grey.”

John Peck
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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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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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HOLIDAYS IN SOVIET SANATORIUMS

AT THE CENTER of the Venn Diagram of Brutalist architecture, spa culture and Communist kitsch lies the Soviet sanatorium. In its heyday, the USSR had a network of hundreds of such centers across dozens of territories, from Estonia to Kazakhstan to the Russian Far East. Though their roots lie in the Russian tradition of curative baths, the sanatoriums of the 20th century shoehorned nicely into Soviet ideals of health and responsible rejuvenation, with workers encouraged to check themselves in yearly for a tune-up of their corporal machinery.

John Peck
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