CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 10/9/2019

'Soviet Metro Stations' is NEW from Fuel Publishing!

Featured stations (Avtovo, Saint Petersburg and Elektrozavodskaya, Moscow) are reproduced from Soviet Metro Stations, the new book from Christopher Herwig, author of previous Fuel bestsellers Soviet Stops I and II. In his essay, “The Heavens Underground,” Owen Hatherley advocates looking at Soviet Metro stations not nostalgically, but based on the urgent needs of the twenty-first century. “We all know that urban economies based on private transport are completely unsustainable—wasteful of resources, poorly organized and hugely destructive of urban and rural space—but we also know that the desire to have a car, to be in one, and to dream of the dubious delights of totally private transport is a powerful force. Rather than attempting to counter this with ordinary buses and shabby tubes, we need another dream to pose against the car. This is where the Soviet Metro truly comes in… as existing spaces, these stations incarnate something important. That is, what Bini Adamczak… calls ‘Communist desire’—the desire to live in a Communist way, in truly Communist spaces. These incredible halls, where some of the greatest art and architecture of the twentieth century is just part of your daily routine, and where head-spinningly dreamlike communal spaces are also places you go through on your way to meet friends, go to work, go to the cinema or the football—these are much more than scattered remnants of a vainglorious empire. They’re an unsurpassed vision of what the public spaces of the Communist future could be like everywhere.”