Falshfasad: Infrastructure, materialism, and realism in wild-capitalist Moscow

Abstract

Zaryadye Park is an extravagant landscaping project–cum–multimedia attraction that opened in 2017 adjacent to Moscow's Kremlin. This article opens with a short reflection on the portents of war legible, with the benefit of hindsight, in Zaryadye's design. It navigates the thicket of aesthetics, ideologies, ecologies, and economies blossoming in Zaryadye, interrogating propagandistic characterizations of it as an ethereal terrain where infrastructure is altogether displaced by emotion, leisure, spectacle, and nature. Zaryadye has its Muscovite specificities, but it is merely one incarnation of a globally emergent architectural ideology—pseudo-ecological, infrastructure-disavowing—which I call “wild capitalist.” Looking for the locus of Zaryadye's really existing infrastructure(s), this article peers behind its falshfasady (false facades)—oversized tarps camouflaging the unsightly “reality” of construction work in 21st-century Moscow. Methodologically, the article makes the case for a Marxist ethnographic realism as a suitable lens for depicting reality-in-motion in the wild-capitalist moment. [infrastructure, architecture, postsocialism, fakeness, Marxism, materialism, realism, Moscow, Russia].