Straßenministerium (G. Tschachawa / S. Dschalaganija / T. Tchilaw / W. Klinberg, Tiflis, Georgien, 1975)
2003
© Frédéric Chaubin
- Artist/s
- Frédéric Chaubin
- Title
- Straßenministerium (G. Tschachawa / S. Dschalaganija / T. Tchilaw / W. Klinberg, Tiflis, Georgien, 1975)
- Year
- 2003
- Edition / Serial number
- 8
- Copy Number
- 4
- Category
- Photography
- Format
- Color Photography
- Material / Technique
- digital print on baryta paper
- Dimensions / Duration
- 117 x 112 cm
- Collection
- ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe
- Description
- French publicist and photographer Frédéric Chaubin has been documenting the monumental and utopian formal vocabulary of public buildings in the former USSR since 2003. In his photographs Chaubin stages this monumental and utopian vocabulary of forms artistically, and thus paints an individual, photographic view of the surviving examples of late Soviet architecture.
The 1985 Druzhba recreation center in Yalta, Ukraine, was designed by architect Igor Vasilevsky. Chaubin captures the Constructivist building that was intended to allow people to experience nature in a controlled way. The exaggeration of the perspective, however, highlights the ambivalence inherent in the building design: The formal language seems completely anachronistic and, in its “Futuristic striving for the utopian future,” bears no visual relationship to the year 1985.
The Ministry of Roads and Highways building in Tbilisi, Georgia, from 1975 is similar. According to the photographer, it was “inspired by the most beautiful Suprematist utopias,” [1] and sets itself above nature: it evokes modern highway interchanges as well as elevated roadways. The anticipation of the future is staged in the perspective used, and illustrates the architectural fiction.
Frédéric Chaubin deliberately exaggerates the dramatic dimensions of the buildings he captures. He thus shows a type of architecture that combines Futuristic science fiction and monumentalism — an expression of the decline of totalitarian Soviet sameness.
[1] Frédéric Chaubin, »CCCP: Cosmic Communist Constructions Photographed«, (Taschen, Cologne: 2011). See the illustration of the Georgian Ministry of Roads and Highways.
Author
Jenny
Images
Frédéric Chaubin, »Straßenministerium (G. Tschachawa / S. Dschalaganija / T. Tchilaw / W. Klinberg, Tiflis, Georgien, 1975)« [Ministry of Highway Construction (G. Tschachawa / S. Dschalaganija / T. Tchilaw / W. Klinberg, Tiflis, Georgien, 1975)], 2003, di© Frédéric Chaubin