A local preservation movement championed by international architects gains momentum in Uzbekistans capital city
The cinematic and architectural lores of Tashkent, Uzbekistan, are inseparableboth speak to the important role the city plays in geopolitics, and to the internationalist fervor which once hummed through its streets, culminating in magnificent artworks both on screen and off. The Central Asian capital stocked to the brim with mahallas, concrete apartment blocks, and Soviet landmarks (Hotel Uzbekistan, Chorsu Bazaar, and the Peoples Friendship Palace, to name just a few examples) hosted the Tashkent Festival of Asian, African, and Latin American Cinema, which took the world by storm between 196888. Today, artists, architects, preservationists, and curators approach this avant-garde history with curiosity and rigor. Tashkent modernism will be center stage in the Uzbekistan Pavilion at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale. The exhibition is co-curated by Ekaterina Golovatyuk and Giacomo Cantoni, cofounders of GRACE, a Milan-based studio. The 2025 Uzbekistan Pavilion, titled A Matter of Radiance, was commissioned by the Uzbekistan Arts and Culture Foundation (ACDF), a state agency created in 2017 by presidential decree thats helmed by Gayane Umerova, ACDF executive director. A Matter of Radiance will portray epic Tashkent modernist buildings like the Sun Institute of Material Science, the site of a memorable 2023 Boiler Room set by Josef Tomari otherwise known as the Heliocomplex, one of the two largest solar furnaces in the world.The Heliocomplex outside Tashkent is one of the largest solar furnaces in the world. (Karel Balas)Both the Heliocomplex and Cosmonaut Prospekt Metro Station have glass installations by Irena Lipene, a Lithuanian artist. (Karel Balas)In addition to other projects at Moscows Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, GRACE previously staged an exhibition in Almaty, Kazakhstan, at Tselinny Theater, which likewise centered modernism in that former capital city, together with historians Anna Bronovitskaya and Nikolay Malinin. Its maybe self-explanatory why [the Heliocomplex] was chosen, Golovatyuk told AN during a press trip to Tashkent this March sponsored by ACDF. Besides its extremely spectacular architecture, its conceptually very interesting. We wanted to use Venice as a platform for our research on the Heliocomplex, but also modernism in Tashkent with ACDF more broadly, in a way that responded to Carlo [Ratti]s curatorial statement, and his manifesto about sustainability and circularity. Tashkent: Then and NowUzbekistans capital is indeed in the midst of an impassioned local preservation movement to maintain remarkable structures like the Heliocomplex, earning international attention in the process. In 2023, Rem Koolhaas, Lukasz Stanek, and other luminaries took part in a symposium, Where in the World is Tashkent?, to discuss Tashkents modernism, which bloomed after a 1966 earthquake that left the city in shambles. Jean-Louis Cohen, prior to his untimely death, was penning an application for UNESCO to help certify Tashkents modernist architecture as world heritage; the 2023 symposium was dedicated to the late historian.Central Exhibition Hall of the Academy of Arts (Karel Balas)This steadfast effort thankfully survives today by Umerova, Golovatyuk, Cantoni, and many others. (A book on the subject, Tashkent: A Modernist Capital, published by Rizzoli, came out earlier this year.) Historian Boris Chukhovich and Davide Del Curto, a professor of architectural conservation at the Politecnico di Milano, are also part of the coalition. Golovatyuk, Cantoni, and Chukhovich will soon debut an exhaustive history of the topic with Lars Mller Publishers, Tashkent Modernism XX/XXI. Del Curto has already submitted applications for 21 Tashkent modernist buildings to UNESCO, having taken on the task after Cohens death, together with Golovatyuk, Chukhovich, and Cantoni. In Architectural Modernism and Old Tashkent: the long history of a brief encounter, Chukhovich recently outlined the handful of Soviet masterplans for Tashkent, which shaped the city and its buildings.Cosmonaut Prospekt Metro Station was completed by Spartak Ziganshin, and others, in 1984. Its glass works were by Irena Lipene. (Karel Balas)The metro station has reliefs indebted to cosmonauts, scientists, and other folk figures. (Karel Balas)Aleksandr Silchenkov developed the first Soviet masterplan for Tashkent between 192932, which called for the Asian and European halves of the city to be united, when traditional mahallas were literally erased from the face of the earth, Chukhovich wrote, and the former Muslim city completely abandoned the traditional way of life and cultural memory it once espoused. It was around this time when Moisei Ginzburg traversed Uzbekistan, informing an influential article he published, National Architecture of the Peoples of the USSR, in which the lauded Constructivist praised Samarkands Ulugh Beg Madrasa, verbiage albeit riddled with Orientalist tropes. Tashkent replaced Samarkand as Uzbekistans capital city in 1930. Another masterplan followed by the Tashkent Architectural and Planning Committee (APU), which called for highways connecting east and west Tashkent. APUs master plan was published in 1937, the same year a wave of repression ensued in the Soviet Republic, targeting national Uzbek minorities. Pioneer filmmaker Khudaibergen Devanov was murdered by the state, among many others. Nevertheless, Tashkent went on to become the fourth most populous metropolis in the Soviet Union after Moscow, Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), and Kyiv, when factories were relocated to Tashkent during World War II, away from the battle lines. In 1967, one year after the devastating earthquake, another masterplan was released by Yuri Puretsky, Aleksandr Vanke, and others, envisioning a modern, socialist utopia atop the rubble. Chorsu Bazaar was completed by Vladimir Azimov and Sabir Adylov in 1980. (Karel Balas)In 1968, the famous Tashkent film festival debuted. In the same vein as Indonesias Bandung Conference (1955) organized by Sukarnomemorably captured by Richard Wright in The Color Curtainand the Afro-Asian Film Festival, which followed in Jakarta (1958) and Cairo (1960), the Tashkent film festival attracted filmmakers from over 70 Global South countries, creating what Turkish filmmaker Can Sungu called an important platform for south-south solidarity, although within Moscows reach.Angela Davis was among those who visited the Tashkent film festival, as did important filmmakers like Ousmane Sembne, the Senegalese director famous for proclaiming Europe is not my center. K. A. Abbas, Souleymane Ciss, Raj Kapoor, and Masaki Kobayashi were all there, and also members of the Palestine Liberation Organization and Manuel Rodrguez Patriotic Front of Chile, which fought Pinochet. Naturally, with so many languages represented, translation was a challenge: There was a noteworthy instance where a young interpreter was tasked with voiceovers for a film shot in an Indian dialect he did not know, so he made up the whole script on the fly, adding jokes, erotic innuendos, illicit affairs, love triangles, and gay sexual encounters, Elena Razlogova wrote in Destination Tashkent: Experiences of Cinematic Internationalism, creating an instant hit, albeit one the director had not envisioned!The Panoramic Cinema was completed by Vladimir Beryozin in 1964. (Karel Balas)It hosted large-scale film screenings and political speeches. (Karel Balas)The House of Cinemaa 1982 Brutalist ensemble by Rafael Khairutdinov, and a slew of other Soviet architectswas one of a few venues where the Tashkent film festival was based, the main one being the Panoramic Cinema by Vladimir Beryozin (1964). Tragically, the beloved House of Cinema was demolished in 2018, setting forth a preservation movement in Tashkent, the former seat of the Soviet Orient, helmed by the ACDF.There was an outcry after the House of Cinema was demolished, at least here in Tashkent, Umerova told AN. Theres a lot of nostalgia surrounding that building; it wasnt just about architecture. This was a place where people would go on dates, see friends. After this building was erased from the map, we started to think about the other buildings it was connected to, and their preservation. Now were interested in showing Tashkent to other cities, the outside world. Were In a HurryToday, 60 percent of Uzbekistans population of 35 million people is under the age of 30, and Tashkent has just over 3 million inhabitants. (After Shavkat Mirziyoyev became president in 2016, birth rates in Uzbekistan escalated for the first time in decades, The Times of Central Asia reported.) The rising population increase strains existing resources, necessitating new schools, hospitals, and cultural institutions, while development pressures stemming from the New Silk Road have increased property values, endangering Tashkents modernist building stock. Were in a hurry, Umerova added. We need to develop new buildings and institutions. Were a young population thats growing fast.Hotel Uzbekistan is perhaps Tashkents most famous Soviet building designed by Ilya Merport, completed in 1974. (Karel Balas)Amid this socioeconomic and cultural transformation, a new contemporary art museumhelmed by New Yorkbased curator Sara Raza, designed by Studio Ko, and backed by the ACDF will reopen this fall inside an old train depot, and further amplify Tashkents internationalist aura. Meanwhile, a new state history museum designed by Tadao Ando is also coming to Tashkent, set for completion later this year. Separate but related, Tselinny Theater, where GRACE staged its 2020 exhibition about Kazakhstans modernism, will reopen in Almaty this month as the Tselinny Center of Contemporary Culture, which underwent a renovation by Asif Khan.The Uzbekistan National Pavilion at EXPO 2025 Osaka by Atelier Brckner opens this month, as does the Aral Culture Summit in Nukus, Uzbekistan, a city north of Khiva on the border of Turkmenistan. The inaugural Bukhara Biennial, curated by Diana Campbell with creative direction by architect Wael Al Awar, launches in September. The New Silk Road is expected to further propel Uzbekistans capital city onto the world stage, explaining the gleaming new glass towers and condos that now populate Old Tashkent, the section west of the Ankhor Canal which divides the Uzbek and Soviet sides of the city.The former Lenin State Museum by Yevgeny Rozanov and Vsevolod Shestopalov, completed in 1970. (Karel Balas)Republican Art College facade (Karel Balas)While Tashkent engages in an impressive amount of institution building, books are written, and skyscrapers and nouveau riche apartment buildings rise where mahallas used to be, architects and preservationists simultaneously strive to keep whats already there, and to celebrate it. Among the list of 21 buildings potentially destined for UNESCO World Heritage status is Zhemchug, an experimental housing complex due east of the Ankhor Canal (the Soviet side) designed in the 1970s by Ophelia Adinova, an Azerbaijani architect. Today, Golovatyuk, Del Curto, and Cantoni work with Zhemchug residents to help ascertain UNESCO status. For Del Curto, buildings like Zhemchug pose epistemological challenges to the status quo in conservation. The Nara Document on Authenticity was drafted in 1994 in Japan, conceived in the same vein as the 1963 Venice Charter, which is today used as a metric to determine whether or not a building is worthy of UNESCO preservation status, and, in turn, authentic in relation to its original state, albeit with a wider worldview. Del Curto notes that this broader understanding of authenticity the Nara Document delivered well serves important buildings like Zhemchug, which has been altered since construction after capitalism took hold. This is a good opportunity for us to bring experimental approaches to preservation strategy, Del Curto said.Other buildings included in the list submitted to UNESCO for consideration include the Panoramic Cinema, which hosted the Tashkent film festival, but also the former Lenin State Museum by Yevgeny Rozanov and Vsevolod Shestopalov (1970), a striking example of Soviet construction intertwined with Timurid Empire motifs like panjara, latticework sunshades popular in the region for centuries. The Heliocomplex is also recommended for UNESCO World Heritage status, given its epic history and scientific grandeur.Leaders of Modern Science in Uzbekistan by V.I. Burmakin, completed in 1984, shows the visionaries who built the Heliocomplex. (Courtesy ACDF)Section of the Helisostatic Field and the Process Tower; notice the chariot (Courtesy ACDF)Hotel Uzbekistan (1974), perhaps Tashkents most famous Soviet building designed by Ilya Merport, is also up for consideration, and so is the Uzbekistan State Circus by Genrikh Aleksandrovich and Gennady Masyagin (1976), Chorsu Bazaar by Vladimir Azimov and Sabir Adylov (1980), the Peoples Friendship Palace by Yevgeny Rozanov (1981), Cosmonaut Prospekt Metro Station by Spartak Ziganshin (1984), and others. Both the Heliocomplex and Cosmonaut Prospekt Metro Station have glass installations by Irena Lipene, a Lithuanian artist. Lipenes glass artwork designed for the Heliocomplex, which weighs seven tons, will be shipped to Venice for the 2025 Uzbekistan Pavilion as per its curatorial teams directive, along with other ephemera from the Sun Institute.Other nominated buildings include structures that may be aptly called decorated sheds like Tashkent Television Center, which features a monumental mosaic by Evgeny Ablin. Indeed, many post-War Soviet mosaics like Ablins throughout Uzbekistan, Ukraine, and elsewhere were inspired by Mexican artists Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros, a phenomena recently captured by Polina Baitsym and Yevgen Nikiforov in their book, Ukraine: Art for Architecture. Philipp Meuser of DOM Publishers lovingly likened these artworks to Tashkents tattoos.The Tashkent Television Center has a mosaic by Evgeny Ablin. (Armin Linke)I think today, people in Tashkent feel as though these buildings are their own, Golovatyuk said. The Peoples Friendship Palace for instance is still one of the current political elites favorite modernist buildings. This is one of the buildings where our strategy, actually, is to do nothing, because its already well kept, although maybe the signage could be improved. One could even argue its more of a peoples palace now than it was in the beginning.
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