The 12-storey house with a tower of 18 stories connects seamlessly to the monumental buildings of the Stalin era. “It is terrible to say it” — Belov hesitates for a moment — “but it is still true: Mussolini, Stalin, and Hitler’s chief architect, Albert Speer, simply had good taste.” Belov also has at the ready the politically correct superstructure for his empire project. He says it is about “de-Stalinising neoclassicism.” In lieu of the enormous Imperial Palace, a playful “House of the Avant-Garde” had originally been planned, with individual wings conceived according to motifs from the painters Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich and Alexander Rodchenko. It would have been Moscow’s version of the Friedensreich Hundertwasser House. [...]
On the other hand, the photographs include futuristic-looking structures, like the government ministry buildings in Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan; the “Zeppelin” high-rise in Moscow; the headquarters of the Russian Railways, also in Moscow; or the chess centre in the oil town of Khanty-Mansiysk in far northern Russia. The point is always to shine with a particular geometric form. [...]
In Moscow City, the symbol of Russian turbo-capitalism, communism seems light-years away. But capitalism and communism have one thing in common: the human being is small, and always just an object. Herfort’s photographs illustrate this as well. When people can be seen at all, they are tiny in comparison to the buildings photographed.
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