
Mosca Verticale
- Publisher
- Federico Motta Editore
- Year
- 2008
- ISBN
- 887179589X
- Specifications
- hardcover
160 pages
colour and black-and-white photographs, shot from the top of Moscow's seven Stalin-era towers (built 1947-1953)
Texts by Alessandro De Magistris, Christian Caujolle, Gabriel Bauret and Umberto Zanetti
Graphic design by Studio Zanuso
Italian (English edition published 2009 by Thames & Hudson as "Vertiginous Moscow")
Photographed from the top of Moscow's seven Stalin-era towers, the monumental "Seven Sisters" skyscrapers built between the late 1940s and early 1950s, this project pairs an unusually elevated, oblique vantage point with Basilico's familiar deadpan precision. Critic Giovanna Volpi describes an urban landscape that appears infinite, its beauty balanced between overall symmetry and a tilted, almost cinematic sense of disorientation, before Basilico returns to street level to look back up at the pale stone giants from below. Combining colour and monochrome photography, the book is as much an architectural and urban-planning document as a vertiginous visual experience. It was published in English the following year as Vertiginous Moscow.