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Resist erasure. Capture the legacy of a vanished era.

Every year, thousands of fragments of an entire civilisation disappear.

Imagine losing 15% of your country's cultural heritage each decade. The entire Renaissance would disappear in a century. This is what's happening to socialist-era monumental art. Perhaps half has already vanished since the collapse of the Soviet Union — destroyed for ideological reasons, cleared for development, or simply left to decay.

This is insanity.

Most people see propaganda: ideology made concrete. Look closer and you find artists who smuggled beauty into a system that demanded obedience. Much of it still stands. Memorials loom over Eastern European squares, cosmic structures rise across the Caucasus, and fading mosaics still color Central Asian cities. But they are disappearing faster than anyone is counting.

This archive exists for one reason: to document and preserve the world's most endangered art before it vanishes completely.

426works documented
170Architecture
102Art
154Urban Forms
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Fired Earth: The Making of Soviet Ceramic Art
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Fired Earth: The Making of Soviet Ceramic Art

The use and type of ceramics underwent a series of evolutions across the Soviet Union’s history. It became one of the USSR’s most-used materials, turning up across Soviet mosaics, reliefs, and more. This piece covers the six ceramic bodies, how glazes and salts behave in the kiln, and how a fired panel was made, sorted, and fixed to contribute to a synthesis of the arts.