Frédéric Chaubin icon 048 | June 2007 French photographer Frédéric Chaubin spent five years documenting the eccentric, lesser-known relics of communist architecture of the 1970s and 80s. He sees these “absolutely weird and strange” monuments – photographed all over the USSR from the Ukraine to Lithuania, Belarus and Georgia as the manifestation of the Soviet government’s increasingly fragile grip on its built environment.
“What is really exciting is to trace the sign of these shapes and what they really mean,” says Chaubin. “Communist ideology was so far from religion, but at the same time religion is clearly at the forefront of some of these designs.”
These buildings also show the influence of the space race and early sci-fi cinema. “In one white circular building in the early 1980s, the Americans were convinced the Russians were building a rocket
