#roberto conte

Casa del Portuale, by Aldo Loris Rossi (1968-1980).

Naples, Italy.

Roberto Conte's ‘Nizhny Novgorod,’ Russia Series

Threatened constructions on the Volga bank in Nizhny Novgorod are a unique monument of Russian engineering from the last third of the 19th century. It was then that edifices with iron framework became widespread, and their openwork pattern, material, riveted joints turned into a symbol of progress. These constructions are the frame of packhouses in the former cargo port at the Strelka, the confluence of the major Russian rivers Oka and Volga. But they were not created specifically for these warehouses: their origin is linked to two All-Russian exhibitions: the 15th All-Russian Industrial and Art Exhibition of 1882 in Moscow and the 16th All-Russian Industrial and Art Exhibition of 1896 in Nizhny Novgorod, the landmark events in the national history. These metal structures are fragments of the central pavilion of these two exhibitions, designed by the engineers Hermann von Pauker and Ivan Vyshnegradsky (it has been taken to pieces in 1882 and reassembled in 1896). Following the exhibition of 1896, the pavilion was dismantled, its framework was sold part by part. For more than a hundred years some of these parts had been a frame of packhouses: first at the Nizhny Novgorod Fair’s wharves, later in the port built during the Soviet period at the Strelka, a restricted industrial area then.

Text Courtesy of Marina Ignatushko (journalist and leader of the "Open Strelka" association in Nizhny Novgorod), translated from Russian to English by Nina Frolova.

See Central Asia’s Unique Soviet Architecture In All Its Brutal Glory

Avicenna mosaic, by Rakhnayev, Ilyayev, and Grigorov (1988). Dushanbe, Tajikistan.