"What a dreadful building!" I have heard it said more than once of the 2003 business centre on Oruzheyny Lane in Moscow's Tverskoy District (photos 1 and 2)

"What a dreadful building!" I have heard it said more than once of the 2003 business centre on Oruzheyny Lane in Moscow's Tverskoy District (photos 1 and 2). As it happens, I rather like this building by the architect Posokhin. Its style is usually called neo-Stalinist, but it is really, of course, a reinterpreted blend of Gothic and Art Deco. The source of inspiration is obvious to me: the 23-storey American Radiator Building of 1924 in New York (photos 3, 4, 5, 6). Despite its modest stature, the American Radiator Building is one of the best-known skyscrapers in the United States and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The building, designed by the architects John M. Howells and Raymond Hood, was originally built for a radiator company, hence the name, and it now houses a hotel. Does our Moscow radiator not seem so very ungainly after the comparison?

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At the close of the Strugatskys' "Roadside Picnic" the Golden Sphere is asked for this: "Happiness for everybody, free, and let nobody go away unsatisfied!" I do not promise to leave no one aggrieved, but the digest really does come free

At the close of the Strugatskys' "Roadside Picnic" the Golden Sphere is asked for this: "Happiness for everybody, free, and let nobody go away unsatisfied!" I do not promise to leave no one aggrieved, but the digest really does come free. So, here is the

Frederic Leighton

Frederic Leighton. “Daedalus and Icarus”, 1869 Daedalus warns his son not to climb too high: the heat of the sun may melt the wax, but Icarus is already gazing into the distance, and the lamentations of a foolish old man interest him not in the least

"What a dreadful building!" I have heard it said more than once of the 2003 business centre on Oruzheyny Lane in Moscow's Tverskoy District (photos 1 and 2)

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At the close of the Strugatskys' "Roadside Picnic" the Golden Sphere is asked for this: "Happiness for everybody, free, and let nobody go away unsatisfied!" I do not promise to leave no one aggrieved, but the digest really does come free

Frederic Leighton

Attempts to resolve the problems of many years of uncontrolled mass migration

Characters from Gogol's "Petersburg Tales" on the pedestal of the monument to Nikolai Gogol on Nikitsky Boulevard, photograph of the 1960s