This is the latest version of the Kosmograd Newsfeed, which has been published since 2005 by Martin Gittins.
The main focus of the blog is architecture and the city, viewed through the lens of Soviet Constructivism, and encompassing themes such as branding and city self-image, Suprematism, disurbanism, space travel, edgelands, borders, landscapes, drosscapes, virtual realities, representations.
I am also a sucker for axonometrics, hexagons and space planes.
During the first few minutes of the rather curious documentary Around the world in 60 minutes, shown recently on BBC Four, there is a stunning short sequence of the Space Shuttle Atlantis (mission STS-132) as filmed from the International Space Station.
As the shuttle slowly approaches the ISS, suddenly a myriad of iridescent hexagon lensflares flood across the screen. It's beautiful.
Here are some screen shots.
In a similar realm to the virtual bleeding into the real (still the most popular post on this blog), these amazing images of St. Petersburg show the past bleeding into the future. Images of modern day St. Petersburg are meticulously matched to wartime images of the city during the Siege of Leningrad.
Instead of a slippage between two spaces. these photos show a timeslip, the exact same location caught at two moments in time. A wormhole opens, we cannot help but fall into it.
Ghosts of the past enter the present.
Leningrad merges with St. Petersburg.
Spend any time on FFFFound, and you'll probably come across this image sooner or later:
Seemingly defying gravity, an impossible cantilever, a tethered spaceship made from corrugated iron sheeting, a rusting Howl's Moving Castle.
Here's another view.
The reality is that the original photograph, of an abandoned grainery, near Krasnosilka in Ukraine, was simply photoshopped to remove the other struts. But it's amazing how the perception of the structure is alterated so completely by simple photo-trickery. The enthusiasm of the comments shows just how much people wanted it to be true.
There's another one here:
With this series of image manipulations, photoshopper Kyryl has created a new archetype of rural structure. The Germans, of course, have a word for it - lügengebäude - "a building of lies," an elaborate edifice of interrelated falsities.
Is "form follows fiction" the new language of architectural production?
The web site of Branislav Kropilak now features larger scale images of the beautiful parking garages series, and the stunning billboards series of photographs.
In the Garages series, underground parking garages become a secret place of order, rhythm and intense colour. The images appear almost hyperreal - the empty spaces so brightly lit, the surfaces so gleaming, the symmetrical one-point perspective - that they almost seem computer generated.
Similarly the Billboards series, with its vertiginous views looking straight up the stanchions of a billboard tower, each glowing in a dusk sky,present an alien view of a familiar object.
I am increasingly becoming convinced that there is more truth in these 'found' architectures than any of the works that feature in contemporary architectural magazines. If Learning from Las Vegas taught us to think about the separation of sign and container via the casino signs along the Vegas strip, these images invite us to consider the signs themselves as pure structure, signifying nothing but themselves.
Hidden Towns, by Austrian photographer Gregor Graf, offers a fascinating view of the contemporary city. With careful retouching, Graf removes his images completely of signs and symbols.
What is left is unsettling, the cities seem deserted and uninhabited. The photographs of Graf's home town of Linz are especially provacative, with the flat colours of streets and building facades strongly recalling paintings by Edward Hopper.
This is Graf's description of the Hidden Towns project in Linz:
Borderline urban spaces in Linz, major thoroughfares leading in and out of the city, lined with buildings from the 50s to the 80s. Districts formerly located on the periphery that are today squeezed in between the city's historical centre and the frayed suburban and industrial zones lying on its outskirts. These are the motifs of the four photographic works in Gregor Graf's hidden town - verborgene Stadt series. The "stars" in these photos are are the buildings on Dinghofer, Dametz and Mozart Streets. Back in the 60s this streets were incorporated into a traffic concept that was even then reguarded as only an interim solution to get the rising number of vehicles in the city centre under control. Buildings were torn down, whole rows of houses were shifted and existing structures were were altered. These intermediaryregions became spaces dedicated efficient movement, filled with all the traffic lights and signage systems that entails.
The city as living space is today no longer shaped by the individuals who inhabit it. At the textural level - with words, symbols, logos, directional and traffic signs, commands and prohibitions-the only elements allowed are those that serve the end of law or consumption. Free expression, such as graffiti or the unauthorized hanging of posters in the public space is punishable by law. The real city is increasingly becoming a personality-drained world of corporationsand branding, coupled with the proliferation of rigorous regulations dictating how individuals are expected to behave. Modernism tried to rid architecture of ornament-advertisingand directional systems have now brought it back, under a new guise and with a new function. City centres have evolved into "literary" spaces. New technical possibilities (glass, large print, tickers, digital text production technologies, mega displays, transparent buildings) turn buildings facades into another medium for conveying nwes, with whole buildings becoming there own logo.
For hidden town - verborgene Stadt - Gregor Graf applied a complicated retouching process to remove all graphic elements from his photographic images. They appear as spaces void of signs, making them seem unreal, and cultural interchangable. At the same time, they offer an undisguised view of the architecture and at the clarified spacial systems. The digital editing involved traffic signage and graphics. Signs of wear and tear, such as patina or weathering, and things that hint at human usage were deliberately left unaltered. But the cultural and communicative information we are accustomed to seeing has disappeared. An apperantly virtualized space emerges, which we are unable to reconcile with our normal visual experience. How is a city without signs, without visual regulations, without guiding graphics, perceived? How do we move through this urban construct? Do we still recognize these (non) places?
Previously:
