Moscow, the Narkomfin Building and the Melnikov House, December 2014
In Moscow, for two days, for the Urban Forum, and various meetings.
I recall photos my father showed me of a school trip he led to Moscow in 1968. He was a teacher at the American International School of Zürich. from where he took his class to Red Square and more besides. The slides were all saturated Kodachrome, sharp clobber and fresh faces, Soviet might and awed western tourists, each image delivering a hefty payload of emotions and culture.
These are different times now, in most ways, yet Moscow, like London and Berlin, has more history in each brick than most cities possess in their entirety.
But funnily enough, it made me think about our time in Finland as much as anywhere. I began to understand why much of Finland was as it was. Moscow was like an scale model of Helsinki. Or vice versa, I suppose. Helsinki as 1:20 scale Moscow. Moscow as a 20:1 Helsinki. Much in the same way, perhaps, that New York is a scale model of a western European city, stretched in all three dimensions.
Helsinki’s more monolithic housing blocks — the ones you see from a taxi window, driving in from the airport — were here in Moscow, only more so. The same hulking rectangular massing; the same inactive ground plane onto the pavement; the same arched, gated portals through…
