Infinity According to Florian (2022) documents two protagonists threatened with destruction—a landmark Kyiv modernist building and its architect—several years before Russian missiles started falling on the city. Florian Yuriev, an octogenarian polymath, designer, luthier, and artist of the Thaw-era avantgarde committed to a universal synesthetic language of color and pure forms is suffering from cancer. His most famous work—the iconic Institute of Scientific, Technical, and Economic Information (built 1965–71), better-known as the Flying Saucer for its distinctive shape—is menaced by the aggressive real estate development that metastasized throughout Kyiv during the past decade.
High-rises and shopping malls, often built with illegally obtained permits and little or no consideration for urban planning or safety, have contributed to choking traffic and increased air pollution, embittering many Kyivites. Already flanked on its north side by a gargantuan new shopping center (due to building-code violations, the basement floors of this building have since flooded with scalding hot water, sending several people into emergency rooms), the Flying Saucer faced the threat of being swallowed by yet another sprawling commercial project on its other two sides in 2017. Vagif Aliyev, owner of this new development, confessed to being inspired by advice allegedly given to him by Donald Trump: “Just build the tallest building in the city and then decide what to do with it later.” As the foundation pit is being dug and the concrete poured, the architects working for Aliyev send Yuriev increasingly garish postmodern plans for the incorporation and redesign of his building into this new, vague but most certainly commercial project. With Kyiv's Bureau of Urban and Architectural Planning all but shut down and its own offices recently transformed into a luxury apartment complex, it is hardly a surprise that the city officials were unwilling to offer much help to Yuriev. The scenes of Yuriev negotiating for his building with dismissive municipal bureaucrats, who barely acknowledge his presence or lift their eyes from their phones, are some of the most painful in the film.
Radynskiy does more than document the struggle of a frail aging architect against an ignorant oligarch developer and Kyiv's corrupt municipal officials. A meditation on the fate of socialist modernism in the postmodern capitalist urban space, it is also an attempt by the first post-Soviet Ukrainian generation of intelligentsia to re-evaluate the significance of the Soviet architectural legacy on their own terms, free of either nostalgia or the post-colonial resentment that spurred much of the post-Maidan “decommunization” and hasty demolition of Soviet-era mosaics and constructions. It is a document of generational shift: the first adults to come of age in independent Ukraine articulate a critique of the “fathers,” who either sincerely or cyclically embraced extreme individualism and the free-market economy—and proceeded to bulldoze Ukraine's cultural heritage.
Yuriev (1929–2021) himself is a peculiar figure. His work straddles the line between official and unofficial, colonial and anti-colonial cultures, and does not easily align with what James C. Scott described as “authoritarian high modernism,” with its thinly disguising imperialist ambitions and indifference to local conditions. Yuriev's building is instead an example of the vernacular, belated avant-garde that developed along the peripheries of the Soviet Union. Born in Siberia to a Russian political prisoner father and an Evenk mother, Yuriev harbored an extreme dislike for Soviet authorities and a profound fascination with the indigenous cultures of the North. In Radynskiy's film he explains that his desire to develop a universal synesthetic color-based language arose from two distinct phenomena of childhood in the Gulag: the spectacle of the aurora borealis, and the overwhelming linguistic diversity of the North, where multiple tribes, historical settlers, and prisoners of all nationalities were forced to coexist. Yuriev came to study and work in Kyiv through the late-Stalinist colonial policy of encouraging Russian migration to the territory of the Ukrainian SSR. Yet he never supported Ukraine's colonial subjugation to Moscow and remained receptive to distinctly Ukrainian culture, befriending many dissidents persecuted for nationalism by the Soviet authorities.
The appreciation that Radynskiy and the other young people working to preserve the Flying Saucer (many affiliated with the Save Kyiv Modernism initiative) show Yuriev reflects a growing fascination with Soviet architectural legacy and with some of the universalist ecological and collectivist utopian ideals embedded in it. Radynskiy's film was released in 2022, at a time when the main threat to Kyiv was coming from the Russian army. However, as the post-war reconstruction of Ukraine is already being publicly discussed, Radynskiy's film provides us with disquieting reminder of the danger of excluding Ukrainian historians, urbanists, and civic groups from plans for the reconstruction of the nation's urban spaces.
