FREDERIC Chaubin was wandering through a market in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, in 2003 when an old book snared his eye. Although unable to read the words, the French photographer was mesmerised by the images it contained.

Chronicling 70 years of post-revolution architecture, the book featured an extraordinary collection of buildings that drew on an extraordinary collection of styles: as well as the Soviet schools of suprematism (a controlled explosion of geometric forms) and constructivism (wild projections, provocative angles), there was a strong western undercurrent, with echoes of everything from Alvar Aalto and Antoni Gaudi to Oscar Niemeyer. And running through all this was a thrilling element of Soviet over-reaching, a hint of sputniks, space rockets and flying saucers.

Chaubin was hooked. And so began a seven-year odyssey to seek out and photograph some of the Soviet era’s most unusual architectural creations, many now under threat. Each one, says Chaubin, was amazing. “It was like finding an undiscovered monument — a Machu Picchu of your own.”

Take the highly improbable Georgian ministry of highways, a heroic, Jenga-like arrangement of windowed oblongs completed in the mid-1970s. Based on a concept called the Space City method, and showing an eco-awareness way ahead of its time (especially for a highways agency), the ministry takes up little ground area, allowing nature to swarm in under it. Or take the architecture department of the Polytechnic Institute of Minsk: in Chaubin’s photograph — which appears in Cosmic Communist Constructions Photographed, the culmination of his odyssey — it resembles some mighty passenger ferry breaking through a frozen Belarussian river.

And then there’s the marvellous Druzhba sanatorium by the sea at Yalta, a stack of cogged carousels rising out of a bank of trees, each notch a living space. “It was mistaken for a missile base by Turkish intelligence and the Pentagon,” says Chaubin, who is the first to admit that his book is the work of a keen-eyed amateur, not an architecture expert. Perhaps we should be grateful: it’s hard to imagine any expert going to the lengths Chaubin did. His book features a ravishing shot of the president of Armenia’s holiday home, a glazed modern tower perched on a peninsula that looks out like a sentinel over Lake Sevan and the mountains beyond. To get the picture of the home, which perfectly captures its air of invincibility, Chaubin had to hire a boat and bob about as near as he dared, risking the attentions of the president’s well-armed security guards.

Partly because of the language barrier and partly because the creators of these wonders have rarely been feted, this Soviet capacity for exuberant architecture has passed by all but undetected in the west.

It comes as a surprise, a shock even. Their openings were recorded, but usually only in Architecture SSSR, a state magazine, or in books such as the series published in 1987 for the 70th anniversary of the October Revolution, celebrating the architecture of each of the 15 Soviet republics in those years; it was this publication that so transfixed Chaubin in the market.

There was also the fact that travelling through the Soviet Union, especially off the beaten track, was not exactly encouraged, so many fascinating buildings remained almost unknown outside their homelands.

What really surprised Chaubin, though, was the fact that the most stunning buildings he found had gone up in the dying days of the communist era. “They were nearly all built in the last 15 years of the Soviet Union. It seemed strange, at first, that they were realised in so many different forms — especially as most Soviet architecture was still in the prefabricated style of the mid-1950s laid down by Khrushchev, with cheap concrete, straight Modernist lines, and little place for the artistic imagination.”

This, he says, was because the 1970s and 1980s saw an upsurge of local talent, as designers found themselves no longer so shackled by constraints laid down by Moscow. In this way, they could even be read as the swansong of a superpower, created by people freed from centralisation, looking to and borrowing from the west. “You can see in these buildings the break-up of the Soviet Union,” says Chaubin, “before the system finally collapsed in 1991”.—Dawn/Guardian News Service