‘...That’s the Zone. It may even seem capricious. But it is what we’ve made it with our condition. It happened that people had to stop halfway and go back. Some of them even died on the very threshold of the room. But everything that is going on here depends not on the Zone, but on us!’ — Stalker
Andrey Chernykh
2 Our crossover drove over the hill, bobbled a bit and steadied itself as we descended down towards a more levelled plane. Dmitriy pored over his laptop to find the ever elusive accessible path as he gave directions to Vladimir out loud. Suddenly, a bend around the hill gave us a hint of car wheel tracks and we took our chances that would be the path that would lead us to a more defined road. Surely the path started to become more treaded. Dmitry pointed to a cluster of low mountains in the far distance. Our destination should be just beyond. Revving the engine Vladimir pushed ahead. It was half an hour before our Toyota started climbing and the road started to zig-zag around much bigger hills. We reached the valley where the road stretched between two hills and around the bend we started our descent. The turn revealed a wide, open landscape the horizon as a straight line and the sky a vast soft blue. The scene was interrupted by small structures poking out of the ground; assessing the distance, they appeared quite far from each other. As we approached, they were coming closer together, and I realised that they were forming a line leading to the centre. Dmitry said, ‘There! You can really see them now, those are the
‘geese’ measuring towers, they kind of look like geese in profile.’ As soon as the towers aligned, a sharp turn revealed a path running along them. Vladimir steered the car into it. Exhilarated, I rolled down the window, took out my DSLR mounted on a tripod and held it tight against the door of the car to minimise the turbulence. It filmed the approaching tower and the impression that one was flying over the blades of grass. Closer and closer, the road started to meander and at times the camera revealed the towers tightly lining up along a single vanishing point. The tower was really close now, and at about three stories tall seemed monumental in a vast open steppe. We parked the car in its shade and got out to take a closer look.
above: Approaching and examining the geese towers
On Site review 35 : the material culture of architecture
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