A nedostroika is an unfinished building, and there were many of them in Russia in the 80s and 90s, cheap 14-story apartment buildings to be that somehow never got done. The conceptualists Ilya Kabakov and Andrei Monastyrsky viewed them and their attendant stagnant pools of fetid water as an allegory for the failure of the Soviet Union. I don't know if they ever quoted Walter Benjamin take on allegory in the Baroque: "allegories are in the realm of thoughts what ruins are in the realm of things", but they might as well have.
The physical legacies of poor planning occur cyclically. I remember well expanses of excess office space in Cary in 1989, and have read of elevated highways to nowhere in Thailand 1997 and boatloads of excess fiberoptics capacity ca 2002-3. All this stuff tends to work itself out in time.
But what of today's surfeit of McMansions and condos, will they be absorbed into the flow of history, or will they be stripped, looted, and rotted? Time will tell.
Sunday, April 13, 2008
Nedostroiki
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1 comment:
The break-up of the Soviet Union let the unscrupulous contractors loose on the rest of Europe. There are many half-finished buildings in Istanbul, the Russian contractors having long since left with all the owners money.
Maybe we'll add "Never trust an investment banker" to the "Never trust a Russian" phrasebook.
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