📖 Vertiginous Moscow

Over the last fifteen years, the city of Moscow has undergone vast and radical transformations, which have turned it into an extraordinary urban laboratory. This photographic project by Gabriele Basilico, in association with the architect Umberto Zanetti, was inspired by a desire to document this metamorphosis, and takes as its focal point the city's seven Stalinist towers, known in Russian as the vysotnye zdania, or "tall buildings". In the 1940s and 1950s, Stalin's skyscrapers assumed a key role in the town plan of Moscow. They convincingly blended ideology, architectural monument and urban form to embody the idea of 'Socialist Realism', and between the end of the war and the death of Stalin they provided inspiration for the reconstruction of major cities in the Soviet Union and many cities in Eastern Europe. And they continue to play an important role today: their unmistakable image is forcibly impressed on the palimpsest of Moscow, where the vertical accent is ever more...