I want this for christmas

Selected out of an archive of 10,000 photographs, this is a documentation of Modernist architecture in the USSR from 1922 to 1932. Pare approaches the subject matter like the Strugatsky brothers' Stalkers, making journeys into the dilapidated working class quarters of the former Soviet Republics, bargaining for passes into military-industrial sites, and returning with depictions of exquisite objects that have, no doubt, seen better days. The book is, essentially, the final meeting point of the two poles of the Soviet Modernist aesthetic--the gleaming, seamless surfaces, revolutionary optimism and technocratic zeal having long since been overtaken by weathering, their concrete cracked, their artificial, glaring paintwork faded and crumbling and the technical rhetoric shown to conceal medieval construction techniques. Yet the archaeological scale of Pare's project is equally remarkable: an entire illustrated history of a country's Modernist architecture, which easily rivaled in its formal brilliance and the totality of its scope the 'classical Modernist' (and very well upkept) German and Dutch work of the 1920s and 30s.