periferiadomestica: Baños Soviéticos Hydroklinika By Nicolas Grospierre is a series of 32 photogr
periferiadomestica: Baños Soviéticos Hydroklinika By Nicolas Grospierre is a series of 32 photographs of a treatment spa complex built between 1976 and 1981 in Druskininkai, Lithuania, once one of the Soviet Union’s most popular spa towns. The complex boasted 50 healing rooms, 80 thermal baths, 40 mud baths, and an underground pool, and could accommodate up to 500 patients. Grospierre photographed the facility in 2004, a year before it was partially demolished and radically transformed into a water park. He recalls that the eerie emptiness of the abruptly abandoned building reminded him of a modern Pompei, and that “the frozen state of the architecture from this perspective is very telling about the Marxist project. Incredible, Utopian, buoyant, but not practical, and not economically viable.” The architecture stood vacant as a relic of a communist country and system that no longer exists. The complex was designed by little-known architects Romualdas and Ausra Silinskas on a ternary plan, which means that each element is repeated by a multiple of three. And since Grospierre photographed both the interior and exterior of the building uniformly, in what he characterizes as a “global, objective, and systematic” way, many of the photographs appear to be the same when in reality they are three different parts of the building. Text Vía grahamfoundation.org/ -- source link
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