Aurora­­, Kyrgyzstan The ship-shaped, brutalist Aurora was built in 1979 for the communist party elite. At that time more than 350 employees tended to every need of the 200 or so guests. ‘From the moment they opened their eyes in the morning, they were surrounded by the best doctors,’ says Erkinbek Borubaev, the sanatorium’s deputy director. Some claim the sanatorium was named after the battleship that fired the first shot in the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, while others contend that architect Yuri Nikolaevich Minaev drew inspiration from The White Ship, a novel by Kyrgyz author Chingiz Aitmatov

Photograph: Michal Solarski