Above: The relaxation room (left) of the Livadia Sanatorium, which was built
in what used to be a Romanov palace. The Central Sanatoria Swimming Pool
(right) in Yalta was used by townspeople as well as neighboring spas.
Nadezhda Mandelstam--wife of poet Osip Mandelstam, who died in the gulag--once
wrote that every decade produced a new Soviet type. These sanatoriums display
the changing face of a failed utopia and the uneasy embrace of the International
Style. The earliest Soviet sanatoriums, established under Lenin, were appropriated
Romanov cribs such as the Livadia Palace near Yalta, where Stalin, Churchill,
and Roosevelt divided up the postwar globe. In the 1930s and '40s came neoclassical
caricatures from VOPRA, the Association of Proletarian Architects. The Modernism
of the 1920s, formulated by UNOVIS and other collective arts groups, never
reached the beach. Alexander Rodchenko may have designed a workers' club--but
not their Ramada Inns, which is what the Stalinist style resembles.
The future--which was invented in Russia--didn't arrive architecturally
until the post--World War II building boom. After mass death came mass
recuperation and mass habitation. The notion of a new world was replaced
by that of a secure world, and the formal monotony of Miesian adaptations
was the sign of security: repetition meant more of the same, with "more"
and "same" the guarantee of stability. So the newer sanatoriums,
such as Sosnovaya Roscha, might be transposed without incongruity to the
infamous St. Louis Pruitt-Igoe site or to Washington Square Village, where
NYU faculty would feel right at home. A demotic version of the International
Style linked East and West; only context imposed different meanings. These
spas are intelligible because the language they speak is not one of pleasure
but of normalcy. In Disney's vision of history, an ersatz GE future was
simply the extension of an ersatz Main Street.
Above: The Moldova Sanatorium in Odessa, had a pool (left)
inside the facility. Chairs overlooking the Black Sea from
the Mishkor Sanatorium esplanade (right).
Marx made a famous remark to the effect that history repeats itself, the
first time as tragedy, the second as farce. What has happened to many
sanatoriums seems like parody. Some, like the Moldova Sanatorium, have again
become convalescent centers--with few medicines and fewer niceties like
bed linen--for treating TB sufferers and the legion of Chernobyl victims.
They have also become centers for New Age therapies, from massage to mineral-water
treatments. Some have even reinvented themselves as spas catering to the
novo Russki (as successful cowboy capitalists are called), the same
big spenders who take their American vacations at Disney World's Grand Floridian.
Many sanatoriums haven't made it at all. With the option to go elsewhere--even
limited as it is by money--most Russians have voted with their feet, turning
the sanatoriums into what the architect Mario Salvadori called "instant
ruins." These massive structures that characterize modern life were
built not as monuments for eternity, whose decay would be noble and laden
with meaning, but to satisfy temporary local purpose. Having outlived the
moment, their presence is puzzling, their decay preposterous. The swimming
pools collapse, the corridors peel, and the parks become shooting galleries
for junkies. When Oddy was photographing these places, he was being shown
around by a woman who at one point asked, "So, you just want to show
Russia as a rat-hole?" Far from it. These photographs don't condemn--they
pose the ultimate posthistorical question: What happens after eternity is
over?
An exhibition of Jason Oddy's sanatorium-spa photographs is currently
showing at the Frederic Taylor Gallery, in New York.
