In this volume, photographer Frédéric Chaubin brings 90 buildings from the final phase of the Soviet Union back from oblivion. The poetic images from 14 republics document a last flourishing of creativity in the declining empire between 1970 and 1990. Unlike in the 1920s or 1950s, there is no recognizable unified "school" here. Instead, the buildings emerged from the chaotic impulse of the imploding system. Their diversity anticipates the disintegration of the Soviet Union.

The architects took advantage of the freedoms that arose from the crumbling of the monolithic state structure: they went far beyond modernism and returned to the roots of free invention. The boldest created projects that the constructivists could only dream of, while others expressed their imagination in striking ways.