cinemas

Khirghizie Bishkek Cine, Russia. correction: Bishek, Kyrgyzstan. see the comments section,

So, things slow down a bit in the summer – not being very assiduous right now.

I love this building.  It is from a wonderful series of movie theatres posted by cinebxl on flickr.

Comments

[Dennis]

The caption's a bit off, as this building is not in Russia, but in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. Here's a nice photo showing the building as it was then and as it is today: http://kloop.kg/files/2013/01/Rossiya.jpg

[stephanie]

Dennis, thank you for this comment, I should have looked Bishkek up. As someone trained in modernism, I have a fondness for the austerity of the original version, but perhaps this is modernism's enduring problem: it seems slightly humourless, intolerant of the kind of human frailty that actually likes entertainment and gaudy posters. It was a very dour movement.
Well, maybe not dour, but rather serious. Perhaps this was because it found itself in gaudy environments of an earlier era and so took an aesthetic high road. Now we don't even have those earlier florid contexts, the high road appears a bit bleak.

or maybe, after spending some time at http://habitar-arq.blogspot.ca/, a Peruvian site centred on modern architecture, there was a degree of subtlety about modernism that is invisible to popular culture, contemporary media conventions, and environments learned from things such as shopping centres, the 'public' hearts of our cities today. They are there, modernist beauty and ideals, but we no longer have the visual acuity to see them.