hurrengoa
red gaps: un-built soviet architecture uxueta labrit   “Architecture is the least bribable witness in history”.
Octavio Paz
Everybody knows that history is written by the victors. In history, Darwin’s principles of natural selection also carries its weight. The same thing happens in architecture. Sometimes, the chosen winning buildings in competitions are built, everything else being left aside. However, sometimes for other reasons (economic, political...), these buildings are never carried out. So, where does all the un-built architecture go? What, if Octavio Paz was right, did this un-constructed architecture witness?

Witnesses to failure and inability. These invisible buildings, enemies of luck, could just possibly be more interesting than the “successful” architecture openly visible to us. Basically because they are witnesses to a history than can never exist. Unlike other areas, architecture retains traces of projects and ideas in plans and models, etc... And these almost non-existent architectural scribblings and their like help us fill in gaps in our non-existent history. A fine example of this are the constructions that never saw the light of day in the Soviet Union. These gigantic buildings, based on classical style, traditional Russian architecture and functionalism, buildings that were born and died in the 20th Century, are a metaphor for happened to the socialist republics...