The Last Sitting

Sanatorium Metallurgist, Tskaltubo, Georgia — 1930s. One of nineteen sanatoria built in a spa town where Soviet workers were sent to take the mineral waters: a civic architecture of rest, built at the scale of a small city. Concert hall, ballroom, colonnade and treatment rooms, faced in local marble beneath coffered ceilings. Abandoned since the early 1990s. Across nine spaces the chairs remain in position — placed, facing forward, never moved. The architecture is failing. The furniture is not.