PAVEL ROMANIKO

WORDS

The project is a reflection on the concepts and legacy of modernist ideals found in still ubiquitous sprawls of Soviet architecture. The endless vistas of monolithic tombstone-like building blocks beg many metaphors and associations to a wandering mind, however, their legacy of impact onto the generations of people that inhabited and navigated the interrupted landscape is much harder to pinpoint. The modernist project insisted that the values of any society could be both implied and reformed by the houses that such society builds and inhabits. The ubiquitous block apartment architecture of rapid Soviet urbanization is a stark expression of its social order and ideals that were bestowed onto its populace. The pursuit of a grand vision at any cost found in the labyrinth of indistinguishable apartment buildings morphed into identical blocks is an embodiment of determinism to build a communist project at the disposal of the purpose and value of an individual human life.

These AI-generated models presented as cyanotype prints here are as unimaginative as the samples that informed them. They cannot escape the limits of the modernist imagination that prioritizes function and form over structure and surface appearance in pursuit of idealized (and rapidly constructed) space. The models fail to recognize the discrete constituents that contributed to their becoming; the implication of continuous space is both implied and interrupted. Just like in a taxonomy, the images of buildings are offered to the viewer as specimens for dissection and classification.