For the World Day of Aviation and Cosmonautics: The exhibition “The City of the Sun. The Architecture of Communism” in Saint-Petersburg

April 12, 2013 at the State Museum of the History of Saint-Petersburg opened the exhibition “The City of the Sun. The Architecture of Communism”.

The exhibition, organized by the State Museum of the History of Saint-Petersburg and the Leningrad branch of the All-Russian Movement “Essence of Time” features about 100 photos of buildings - the best examples of “space” style, designed by Soviet architects in the 1960s and 1980s in the USSR and abroad from Vladivostok to Havana.

The theme of space was the sense-theme in the Soviet culture of 1960-1980s, including the architectural objects.

The section of the exhibition is “The environment for the new man”, “Transformation of Nature”, “Temples of Science” - show that the architects of the Khrushchev and Brezhnev periods were not only the mass construction of affordable housing. In search of cutting-edge architects expression refers not only to the achievements of Western architecture, avant-garde legacy of the 1920s, but also to the principles of medieval architecture and traditions of national architecture of the USSR.

The exhibition in the Peter and Paul Fortress is the best achievement of the Soviet “space” architecture: the building of the Presidium of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR in Moscow (1968-1982), the Drama Theater in Novgorod (1987), The Institute of Cybernetics and Robotics in Leningrad (1987), the Sailing Center in Tallinn (1980) and more than fifty other buildings that break the stereotypes of this architecture as boring. Several of them continue to build, to form, which cause direct associations with space objects, intergalactic ships and flying saucers: building of the Lenin Komsomol Museum of Automobile Plant in Moscow (1972), a cafe-restaurant “Float” in Dnepropetrovsk (1976) and others.