Full exposure: The Constructivist Project is keeping the avant-garde alive one photo at a time

Natalia Melikova, a photographer with roots in both Russia and America, started taking pictures of Constructivist buildings for her Master's thesis. But, after submitting her work, she kept going, inspired by the richness of the period and the beauty of the buildings. Now, living in Moscow, she runs The Constructivist Project, a website dedicated to showing her delicate black-and-white images and to leading the battle against the destruction of Constructivism's architectural legacy. "This architecture was ahead of it's time: very ingenious, practical, innovative," Melikova says. "On some level, they are optimistic buildings, trying to make life better, more organised, more pragmatic — and I'm a pretty optimistic person... Maybe there's something in that shared optimism?"

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