Book: “Cosmic Communist Constructions Photographed”

The 90 late-Soviet-era buildings that Frédéric Chaubin surveys for CCCP: Cosmic Communist Constructions Photographed don’t make a single persistent claim about Soviet architecture from 1970 to the fall of the Berlin Wall. The aesthetic linkage between the flying-saucer-shaped circus in Kazan, Tatarstan, and the stacked-shipping-container look of the Ministry of Highways in Tbilisi, Georgia, is—at best—the severe geometry that persisted even in the absence of a top-down design directive. Late projects from 14 total former Soviet republics speak more to science fiction than Soviet Constructivism.• $59.99; Taschen, March 2011