“Dreaming cosmos is deeply rooted in the society’s mentality,” says Columbia professor specializing in Soviet architecture Xenia Vytuleva. “It has a different edge, so to say. It is also about intimate relationship.”
That intimate relationship between human and cosmos permeated every sphere of Russian life, from poetry and art to film—and, eventually, architecture. In 1924, there was the Soviet silent film Aelita: Queen of Mars directed by Yakov Protazanov, a black-and-white tale of telescopic love, political uprisings, and space travel. Some of the Mars-based scenes take place in a sterile Orpheum setting filled with curved, metal structures—like an Art Deco abstract interior of the Death Star. Four years later, in 1928, the Russian architect Georgii Krutikov sketched a “flying city,” a floating group of stacked saucers—a sci-fi solution to overcrowding and, possibly, another crude Cloud City.
As for today? Those Star Wars constructions from the USSR still live on—some dilapidated and ignored in tiny towns, others curiously lensed by tourists. Like the Star Wars series, they are awe-inspiring and majestic monuments full of space-age ideologies, and luckily, located not in a galaxy so far, far away. Above, see the most Star Wars–meets–Soviet buildings located everywhere from Yalta, Crimea, to St. Petersburg, Russia. And skip the rocket: Only a plane ride is necessary.
