Canadian Photographer Captures the Fancy Architecture of Moscow’s “Socialist” Metro Stations

Canadian Photographer Captures the Fancy Architecture of Moscow’s “Socialist” Metro Stations

If you are an architecture student or an architect, then you have probably studied about Russian Constructivism and Tatlin’s Tower, and how that inspired Deconstructivism at some point later, but what about Stalinist Architecture? We all know Stalin for the brutal dictator he was, but what many of us may not know is that his influence extended to architecture, and the results were sometimes literally “bright”.

One of Stalin’s many projects was the Underground Metro, and for a Metro line there have to be underground stations, and these stations were not regarded as mere stop points but something of significance. They were to reflect the socialist concepts of “svet” and “sveltloe budushchee”, meaning light and bright future, and that is how those underground stations ended up like hallways from a Soviet Imperial Palace.

The Canadian photographer David Burdeny spent two weeks in Moscow and managed to capture the bright fancy architecture of its Metro Stations when no one was there, and here are the results.