Eastern Blocks

‘Sleeping districts’ of Moscow, Plattenbauten of East Berlin, modernist estates of Warsaw, Kyiv`s Brezhnevki: although these are home to the vast majority of city dwellers, post-war suburbs of central and eastern Europe have been invisible for decades.

Eastern Blocks by Zupagrafika is a photographic journey through the cityscapes the former Eastern Bloc, inviting readers to explore the districts and peripheries that became a playground for mass housing development after WW2, including objects like Soviet ‘flying saucers’, houses ‘on chicken legs’ or hammer-shaped tower blocks.

Showcasing modernist and brutalist architecture scattered around the cities of Moscow, (East) Berlin, Warsaw, Budapest, Kyiv and Saint Petersburg, the book contains over 100 photographs taken by Zupagrafika throughout the last decade as a reference archive for their illustrated kits and books, with special contributions by local photographers. Divided into 6 chapters, Eastern Blocks includes a foreword by writer and journalist Christopher Beanland, informative maps, index of architects and informative texts on the featured cities and constructions.

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Author: Zupagrafika (David Navarro & Martyna Sobecka)

Contributors:
David Navarro & Martyna Sobecka (Zupagrafika): photography, texts and edition
Alexander Veryovkin: commissioned photography
Balázs Csizik: commissioned photography
Christopher Beanland: foreword

Zupagrafika © 2019. All rights reserved
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‘Zupagrafika photographed postwar estates across central and eastern Europe, finding strange, stark beauty in these concrete giants’

– THE GUARDIAN

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‘Many dismiss them as eyesores, Zupagrafika find them stunning. Their new book features 100 images of modernist housing estates and other unusual Soviet-era structures.’

– WIRED

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‘The Iron Curtain was understood in the West as The Concrete Curtain. Everything behind it was perceived as mass produced and grey'

– from the foreword by Christopher Beanland