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Over the last fifteen years, Moscow has undergone vast and radical transformations, which have turned it into an extraordinary urban laboratory. This photographic project by Gabriele Basilico was inspired by a desire to document this metamorphosis, and takes as its focal point the city’s seven Stalinist towers, known in Russian as the vysotnye zdania, or ‘high buildings’. Basilico’s images use the towers as a privileged viewpoint for exploration and contemplation of the changing fabric of Moscow. After half a century of history, his work allows these striking buildings to be re-evaluated in the context of the new urban landscape of the 21st century.

• New from renowned Italian photographer Gabriele Basilico, a haunting pictorial record of Stalin’s monumental towers that reveals the hidden but coherent rhythms of a city in the throes of huge change.
• An architect by training, Basilico imparts a rigorous order on his haunting photographs and creates a geometry that is based on tormented architecture.
• The ‘towers’, as they are now known, convincingly blend ideology, architectural monument and urban form to embody the idea of ‘Socialist Realism’.
• A companion volume toThames & Hudson’s two other books by Basilico, Berlin and Cityscapes.

Table of Contents

Moscow: Urban Transformations by Umberto Zanetti • Axis Mundi: A Vertical Moscow in Stalin’s Shadow by Alessandro De Magistris • Gabriele Basilico: Unexpected Moscow by Christian Caujolle • One Colour of Reality by Gabriel Bauret • Urban Landscapes: Kotel’niceskaja; KrasnyeVorota; Leningradskaja; Barrikadnaja; MID; Ukraina; MGU