This mosaic of plastic and stone designed by Zurab Tsereteli looks like art, but it’s actually something more than that. It’s a fully functioning bus stop. And stops like these are way more common than you might think. Chris Herwig has seen hundreds of them. For the past 12 years, the Canadian photographer has traveled throughout the former Soviet Union snapping photos of the region’s unexpectedly crazy architecture for his new book Soviet Bus Stops.
Herwig first started noticing the oddly-designed stations during an epic bike ride from London to Moscow, back in 2002. His first photograph was of a simple rectangular shelter somewhere in Central Asia. “It was just so different, thought-out, and quirky,” he recalls. “Like someone with a bit of a design eye was having a good time designing this thing.” Herwig quickly discovered that this wasn’t an architectural fluke. Similarly ornate bus stops were scattered throughout the region, punctuating the otherwise functional skylines of the former Soviet Union with a healthy dose of weird.
For the book, Herwig photographed more than 150 bus stops in 13 different countries. He estimates that over the course of a dozen years, he took more than 9,000 photos of these whimsical structures. Most of the photos were the result of happenstance encounters while he was on assignment for various publications. Others were part of a more deliberate scavenger hunt where he’d map out a route of stops he found by scouring Google street view.
“I rarely found anything cool within a city,” Herwig explains. The most elaborate structures were often located in the countryside where they’d be the only stop for long stretches of road. Herwig says that many of the structures fell under the purview of the government’s roads department and were largely built in the ’70s, during a time when Soviet architecture centered around a mass-produced brutalist aesthetic. In an interview with Herwig, Belarusian architect Armen Sardarov explains that transportation was a point of pride for the Soviet Union, which is part of the reason architects could take so many chances. “We lived in a socialist world. In the socialist world individual transport was discouraged, it was not highly developed, we did not have cars on a massive scale,” he says. “The whole system was built on bus routes… they united the country.”
In that way, the bus stops then were almost like architectural mascots for villages. They reflected their surroundings through materials, colors, and shapes. In Belarus, for example, many of the bus stops were built by the villagers and incorporated rubble stones. In Estonia, most were made from wood. Others—like Tsereteli’s designs along the Soviet Riviera, where Nikita Khrushchev had a summer home—were far more ornate. These follies were considered minor architectural forms, Herwig explains; the low stakes and budgets associated with building them allowed for an aesthetic freedom otherwise unknown in the region. “People could get away with whatever they wanted,” he says.
This lead to some truly bizarre forms. One bus stop in Taraz, Khazakstan is sheet of folded steel propped up by two legs and contorted into a spaceship-like shape. Another, in Rokiskis, Lithuania, is a simple concrete rectangle painted neon yellow and green. The least practical of them all is another Tsereteli masterpiece in Abkhazia, that features a bench with an open, crown-like structure overhead. You wouldn’t want to rely on many of these bus stops during the region’s cold, harsh winters, but as Tsereteli explained when asked about the questionable practicality of his bus stops, functionality was never really the point: “I cannot speak to why there is no roof,” he says. Why this, why that—that’s their problem. “As an artist, I must do everything artistically.”
