Within the second half of the twentieth century, “brutalism and the shall-we-call-it ‘market modernism’…when it appeared within the East, was at all times about spectacle,” Zupagrafika founders David Navarro and Martyna Sobecka say in a blog post about Japanese Bloc suburbia.
Brutalist housing estates and public buildings of the post-war Soviet period had been constructed on a large scale, usually from concrete and prefabricated panels, to accommodate rising populations and to reveal energy, socialist values, and modernity. Typically blocked in colour or complemented by murals, these hulking constructions largely emphasised monolithic kinds, an unmissable PR message about communist ideology.
Brutalism is a research in contrasts—heaviness juxtaposed with steadiness; concrete set into the pure panorama. Eastern Blocks II, Navarro and Sobecka’s new e-book, captures a few of these stark scenes, with expansive residential models rising above bucolic meadows or framed by nothing however snow. Performance takes priority over aesthetics.
Navarro and Sobecka have traveled the width and breadth of Japanese Europe, photographing the area’s distinctive structure and increasing on the primary quantity revealed in 2019. Together with native photographers Alexander Veryovkin and Kseniya Lokotko, who captured views of Kaliningrad and Minsk, the authors chronicle a complete of ten cities from Chișinău to Riga to Prague in additional than 180 images.
Discover your copy on the writer’s website. You may additionally take pleasure in Zupagrafika’s Kiosk, a survey of Japanese Europe’s disappearing tiny retailers.
