Notes from a Soviet Sanatorium: Kislovodsk, 2014

Abstract

In November 2014, the author spent a week at the Ordzhonikidze Sanatorium in Kislovodsk, completed in 1937 by the workshop of Moisei Ginzburg. This hybrid practice-based essay reads the sanatorium and its territory through the methodology of “constructed geographies,” which treats the built environment as a spatial argument about the working body that outlives the state that produced it. Moving between fieldwork narrative, architectural history, and personal notes, it traces the sanatorium’s contested style, its debt to Soviet biomechanics and Le Corbusier, its completion during the Great Terror, and the ornamental program recent scholarship attributes to Ivan Leonidov. When a healing environment loses its political program, atmosphere is what survives, and the essay reads it as historical evidence.