The bus from Sochi airport climbs for forty minutes before it stops, and when it stops you are standing in front of a wall the colour of a thumb pressed against a sunburn. Sanatorium Metallurg, opened in 1956 for workers of the Magnitogorsk steel combine, has the dignified, slightly embarrassed posture of a public building that has outlived its public. A chrome handrail runs the length of the terrace. Nothing else moves.
An architecture of prescribed leisure
The Soviet sanatorium was not a hotel and not a hospital — it was something stranger, a place where rest was issued like a uniform. You were sent here, for twenty-one days, to drink mineral water at the prescribed hour, to walk the prescribed terraces, to take radon baths in rooms tiled exactly as the corridor outside them. The terrazzo was poured to outlast the regime that ordered it, and it has.
The plaster keeps the room cool, the mosaic keeps the eye busy, and the chrome keeps your hand from touching the wall. Together they do most of the work the staff once did.