castles in the air
a topographic essay
2019
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a topographic essay
2019
Northern Chertanovo is an experimental microdistrict built in Moscow in the late 1970s. back then it was conceived as a district that could exist autonomously, built according to advanced architectural and engineering projects. however, not all the ideas that the initial plan carried were implemented, and engineering solutions in most cases were simplified to the at-the-time basics. this place holds within a big dream about a new (better?) life in the future, its fulfillment cut off in the middle.
yet even now Northern Chertanovo is visually quite different from the surrounding bedroom communities.
from the architectural ideas of the seventies it inherited
a lot of unused niches, passages and spaces of unknown purpose, doors and stairs leading seemingly nowhere.
just like any bedroom community, it looks inhabited. at the same time literally behind any wall you might stumble across a space that feels imperceptibly left as if life there had frozen, incapable of flowing, at the very moment the houses were just built, gathering dust ever since, sometimes renovated with just another coat of paint.
there is a lot of air in this place, almost as if it was flying above the city like a castle in the air, its walls painted sky-blue and the wind eternally blowing between the buildings.
from the architectural ideas of the seventies it inherited
a lot of unused niches, passages and spaces of unknown purpose, doors and stairs leading seemingly nowhere.
just like any bedroom community, it looks inhabited. at the same time literally behind any wall you might stumble across a space that feels imperceptibly left as if life there had frozen, incapable of flowing, at the very moment the houses were just built, gathering dust ever since, sometimes renovated with just another coat of paint.
there is a lot of air in this place, almost as if it was flying above the city like a castle in the air, its walls painted sky-blue and the wind eternally blowing between the buildings.
