Out of my window I can see the outskirts of the city. The true outskirts of Saint-Petersburg. Rows of faceless apartment houses with deck-looking strips of cement and glass, unfinished high-rise buildings, here and there punctured with empty window port-holes, and the chimney pipes with fume tails on the backdrop. Sounds of favorite music mix with day-to-day scenery. With the sad difference that only music can be changed, not the scenery.
For their remote resemblance with oceanic liners, the buildings of the Six-hunderd-series are known to the city-dwellers by the name of “ships”. Such kind of irony: in folk imagination, the ugly lined constructions were compared with luxury oceanic vessels. However, despite their architectural ascetism, these “ships” feed my imagination as well. I see them either sailing through dense rainfalls, swinging over storm-swells under thunderclouds, opening their port-holes to North-West droughts and buzzing through fogs or… breathing out puffs of steam over chilly skies, when anchoring near the coastline of the urban ocean… Read Less