Published this spring by FUEL in English, the book Soviet Asia: Soviet Modernist Architecture in Central Asia is a major collaboration between Italian photographers Roberto Conte and Stefano Perego. While working on the territory of the former USSR, they drew attention to the diversity of post-war Soviet architecture, its differences even from city to city, not to mention the republics and larger regions.
This fact is rarely noticed abroad, where not only the Soviet Union, but the entire socialist camp is often presented as a single gray concreted space, combining endless panel high-rise buildings with "brutalism" (it is difficult to come up with a more misunderstood term in the last decade).
To eliminate such a strange ignorance in the era of the global information space, Conte and Perego conceived their book, which will be of interest not only to the foreign reader: under the spectacular cover, there are many buildings that are little known in the post-Soviet space.
What distinguishes Sovetskaya Asia from other foreign editions of Pro sovmod is not only a systematic approach and sensitive attention to the material - including all kinds of context, but also the participation of major researchers. One of the two essays in the book was written by Alessandro De Magistris, a well-known Russian researcher of Soviet architecture, a professor at the Polytechnic University of Milan. In a comment to CNN,
dedicated to the book, he stressed that “although the purpose of these buildings was the embodiment of the social program of the Soviet state […], the way they express their purpose is extremely original. These are very expressive, experimental projects […] There are many cases where individual artistic elements or movements were used. They were largely ignored in the West - especially in geographic regions far from Europe, such as Central Asia. " The author of the second article is a historian, professor at the University of Turin, Marco Buttino, a specialist in the social history of Central Asia and Russia in recent times.
It should be noted the great interest that the publication aroused among the Western reader and the press: the book was included in
Amazon's bestseller list, published by The Guardian, Wired, designboom.com.
