Eastern blocks: Soviet architecture on display – in pictures

Shabolovka radio tower, designed by Vladimir Shukhov. This freestanding structure, built in Moscow 1922, combines creative freedom with a practical function which it still performs to this day
Photograph: Richard Pare/Kicken Berlin

The Shabolovka radio tower viewed from distance, with Havosko-Shabolovskii residential block in the foreground Photograph: Schusev State Museum of Architecture

The photographs in the exhibition are supported by works from the Costakis Collection in Thessaloniki, by the likes of El Lissitzky, Liubov Popova, Malevich and Alexander Rodchenko, whose Linearism (1920) is pictured above
Photograph: State Museum of Contemporary Art

A corner detail of a residential block in the Narkomfin development, 1931. This experiment in communal housing resembled a machine-age monastery; now it's rotted by Russian winters to almost total ruin
Photograph: MA Ilyin/Schusev State Museum of Architecture

Liubov Popova's Spatial Force Construction (1920-21). Architects of the period were often also artists, while artists produced works whose abstract geometry aspired to resemble buildings. The revolution was not only to be achieved; it also had to be symbolised, with the crane a tool for magnifying the motions of an artist’s hand to an immense scale Photograph: State Museum of Contemporary Art

Popova's Painterly Architectonics (1918-19). It is a strange idea, both arrogant and naïve, that compositions in oil paint might shape cities, and the results could be oxymoronic Photograph: State Museum of Contemporary Art

Konstatin Melnikov's Gosplan garage, dominated by a large disc in its elevation, draws on visionary designs from the French Revolutionary era, while also evoking the wheels and radiators of motor vehicles. It was a time when Russian architects were realising the dreams of modernism more fully than anyone else, but also felt free to plunder and recombine ideas from the past Photograph: Richard Pare/Kicken Berlin

Also represented in the exhibition by his workers clubs in Zuev and Rusakov (pictured), and the design for his own house, Melnikov would eventually prove too brilliantly individual for the regime Photograph: Richard Pare/Kicken Berlin

The entrance facade of Melnikov's house, built in 1927-29
Photograph: MA Ilyin/Schusev State Museum of Architecture