CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 7/21/2018

Find summertime staff favorite 'Holidays in Soviet Sanatoriums' at the SF Art Book Fair

These photographs do not get old. Holidays in Soviet Sanatoriums, one of our favorite offbeat Soviet design surveys from UK-based FUEL Publishing, collects 200 color reproductions of the interiors and exteriors of the hybrid mega-spa/medical treatment centers that proliferated in the Soviet Union during the twentieth century, as well as some of the rather unconventional-seeming treatments that took place within. Pictured here is Druzhba sanatorium. “When it was built in 1985 by architect Igor Vasilevsky and engineer Nodar Kancheli,” Maryam Omidi writes, “its neo-futuristic style … caught the eye of the Pentagon and Turkish intelligence, who mistook it for a missile-launch facility. According to Vasilevsky, others feared it might be a time-machine or a flying saucer.” Find it at the SF Art Book Fair, on view through Sunday, July 22!