Frédéric Chaubin. CCCP. Cosmic Communist Constructions Photographed

Frédéric Chaubin's images capture the brutal beauty of extreme Soviet architecture from the final years of the USSR. In these photographs, we explore the vanished world of totalitarian structures, originally designed to dominate and exert omniscient power over civilians through spectacular forms and an austere aesthetic.

Brutalist Beauties
Architectural remains of the USSR

Voted architecture book of the year by the International Artbook and Film Festival in Perpignan, France, Frédéric Chaubin's Cosmic Communist Constructions Photographed explores 90 buildings in 14 former Soviet republics . Each of these structures expresses what Chaubin considers the fourth era of Soviet architecture, an unknown surge that took place from 1970 to 1990.

Unlike the 1920s and 1950s, no single "school" or dominant trend emerges here. These buildings represent a chaotic impulse driven by a decaying system. Exploiting the crumbling monolithic structure, architects went far beyond modernism, returning to their roots or freely innovating. Some of the boldest architects completed projects that the Constructivists would have dreamed of (Druzhba Sanatorium, Yalta), others expressed their imagination in an expressionist manner (Wedding Palace, Tbilisi).

A summer camp, inspired by sketches of a prototype lunar base, claims supremacist influence (Prometheus Youth Camp, Bogatyr). Then comes the "talking architecture" popular in the final years of the USSR: a crematorium adorned with concrete flames (Crematorium, Kiev), a technological institute with a crashed flying saucer on its roof (Scientific Research Institute, Kiev), a political center that watches you like Big Brother (House of Soviets, Kaliningrad).

In their jigsaw of styles, their extravagant strategies, these buildings are extraordinary remnants of a collapsing system. In their diversity and local exoticism, they bear witness to both the vast geography of the USSR and its encroaching demise, the holes in an ever-widening network. At the same time, they immortalize many of the ideological dreams of the country and its time, from the obsession with the cosmos to the rebirth of identity.

The photographer
Frédéric Chaubin was editor-in-chief of the French lifestyle magazine Citizen K for twenty years. Since 2000, he has regularly published works combining text and photography. His research on the CCCP collection was conducted from 2003 to 2010 and published in 2011. He is also the author of the TASCHEN title Stone Age. Ancient Castles of Europe.

Frédéric Chaubin. CCCP. Cosmic Communist Constructions Photographed
Hardcover, 26 x 34 cm
312 pages
English language