When the Home of Cinema in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, was demolished in 2017, it was an architectural awakening for town. A big round concrete constructing accomplished in 1982, the Home of Cinema was an on the spot cultural and architectural landmark within the metropolis, then a part of the Soviet Union. Its demolition, to make method for a controversial commercial development project, spurred many within the metropolis to fret about which landmark would fall subsequent.
That led the Uzbekistan Art and Culture Development Foundation to launch a citywide analysis venture to doc endangered buildings. Most had been constructed between the late Sixties and early Nineteen Eighties when the Soviet Union sought to border its ambitions by means of civic structure. Many buildings from this time embraced modernism, with swooping facades, creative structural types, and clever mosaic panels adorning interiors and exteriors. As public buildings, their fates had been on the whims of presidency leaders desirous to develop town right into a twenty first century financial powerhouse, which is how the Home of Cinema was destroyed.
To attempt to cease others from falling, the Uzbekistan Artwork and Tradition Growth Basis funded a staff of worldwide researchers, historians, and designers to undertake Tashkent Modernism XX/XXI, a analysis venture documenting town’s modernist buildings, and rallying for his or her preservation.
“The focus of modernist structure could be very excessive in Tashkent, however what actually units it aside is the outstanding variety of well-planned, progressive, and elegantly designed public buildings,” says architect Ekaterina Golovatyuk, one of many consultants concerned within the venture and a cofounder of Grace Studio, a Milan-based structure, design, and urbanism agency.
Underway since 2018, the analysis venture has documented 24 key modernist websites throughout town. Of these, 21 have secured nationwide heritage website standing, together with 154 mosaic panels, defending them from demolition.
These buildings, and the continuing effort to save lots of them, is the topic of a pair of latest books, Tashkent: A Modernist Capital, revealed by Rizzoli New York, and Tashkent Modernism XX/XXI, revealed by Lars Müller Publishers. The books reveal Tashkent as an underappreciated hotbed of modernist structure, and a historic turning level for each Soviet and post-Soviet Central Asia.
At one level the fourth largest metropolis within the Soviet Union, Tashkent was chosen within the Fifties as a showcase of the “Soviet Orient,” which resulted in an architectural increase. “The town was meant to show how nicely socialism may adapt to a unique cultural context,” Golovatyuk says. “This initiated a really attention-grabbing seek for native identification, contended between architects from Tashkent and Moscow. The outcome was a change of conventional architectural parts inside the framework of a modernist language.”
This constructing spree took on new urgency in 1966 when an enormous earthquake broken a lot of town. The town’s restoration coincided with a Soviet Union–broad emphasis on prefabricated constructing and new types of development, leaving Tashkent with all kinds of creative and fashionable buildings.
The Tashkent Modernism XX/XXI analysis venture has put this legacy beneath a brand new highlight, serving to to save lots of many buildings from demolition whereas additionally underscoring their significance as town grows. A few of these buildings are additionally being seen in a broader context. Golovatyuk and Giacomo Cantoni, co-founder of Grace Studio, had been lately named curators of Uzbekistan’s nationwide pavilion on the upcoming Venice Structure Biennale. Their exhibition will concentrate on one venture included within the analysis venture, a large-scale scientific complicated outdoors Tashkent often known as the Solar Heliocomplex. Devoted to finding out photo voltaic power, it was forward of its time in each design and intention.
Golovatyuk says this venture and others which might be being saved by means of the Tashkent Modernism XX/XXI analysis venture are discovering new relevance, particularly inside Uzbekistan, the place modern architects are constructing on their heritage. “I believe the seek for nationwide identification restarted virtually from scratch when Uzbekistan gained independence in 1991,” says Golovatyuk, who first visited Tashkent in 2006. “Many buildings have sought to determine continuity with the pre-Soviet previous by means of ornamentation, in all probability in a extra exuberant method than through the modernist interval.”
An rising technology of younger architects is taking explicit inspiration from the buildings being preserved by means of the Tashkent Modernism XX/XXI analysis venture, creating what Golovatyuk calls “a extra subtle dialogue with each custom and the modernist previous.”
The hassle to save lots of and acknowledge these buildings is city-specific for Tashkent, the place modernism is now a type of calling card. However it’s additionally a combat that exists in cities around the globe, similar to Philadelphia, the place an internationally famend police headquarters constructing is losing a long preservation battle, and Boston, the place the federal government heart complicated is a perennial demolition target.
“A number of of those buildings confronted at the least some threat of transformation, however I imagine it’s to be anticipated. The town has been present process fast progress for the previous eight years, there’s vital stress on all actual property,” Golovatyuk says. “This sort of stress is the destiny of modernism not solely in Tashkent, however worldwide.” The analysis venture’s success in securing protected standing for Tashkent’s modernist buildings may very well be a playbook for different cities to comply with.
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