Soviet architecture

Tashkent is an amazing city that attracts tourists and scholars alike with its diverse architecture. The city synthesises several layers of architectural styles from different periods of history. Soviet style – otherwise called ‘seismic" modernism’ – is attracting more and more interest from researchers all over the world.

Text and photos by Munis Nur

In the 1970s Tashkent had a population of 1.5 million and was the fourth largest city in the USSR, after Moscow, Leningrad (now St Petersburg) and Kyiv. It was also the largest city in Central Asia. Tashkent helped build the entire Soviet Union, contributing more than 20 design institutes and construction factories.

Several factors influenced the emergence of modernist architecture in Tashkent. The first was a mighty earthquake in 1966 that completely destroyed the old, traditional Central Asian buildings and left thousands of people homeless. The second factor was the very ideology and creative orientation of the Soviet architecture of that period: “national in form, communist in content.” The Soviet modernisation of the east, with the help of local architectural traditions, formed the basis of the architectural style of Tashkent Modernism.

The birth of modernist architecture in Tashkent began with the Palace of Arts or Panorama Cinema, built in 1964 by a group of young architects, and completed under the direction of S. M. Sutyagin. The building itself is a combination of polyhedral cylindrical and two-storey rectangular volumes. The walls were made of semi-circular concrete panels in the shape of egg-shell halves, which gave the building earthquake resistance.

One of the city's earliest modernist buildings is the Golubiye Kupola (Blue Domes) cafe, built in 1970 on the park boulevard of the same name by the architect V. I. Muratov. Apart from the domes (an expression of the national form), the deep, open terrace created a traditional method of air conditioning the space and also offered a view of the fountain. Today, the terrace is fully glazed.

Also in 1970, architects E. G. Rozanov and V. N. Shestopalov built the building that now houses the Museum of the History of Uzbekistan (formerly the Lenin Museum). Of particular interest is the patterned sun lattice, which refers to the image of a panjara (patterned window lattice) scaled several times over.

Later, in 1974, this technique of abstracting from the traditional ornamented grid was applied to the façade of the Hotel Uzbekistan by architects I. A. Merport, L. I. Ershov and V. S. Roshupkin. The architecture of the hotel is a good example of a combination of European and Oriental styles.

The Central Exhibition Hall of the Academy of Arts of Uzbekistan was constructed from 1972 to 1974 according to the design of architects F. Tursunov and R. Khairutdinov. The façades of the exhibition hall are stylised as peshtak (a traditional arched portal). On the folded lobes that form the corrugations, you can see an ornament made of cotton on a background of blue glazed ceramics.

The Tashkent Circus building can also be considered one of the symbols of Soviet modernist architecture. Designed in 1976 by architects G. M. Alexandrovich and G. Masyagin and constructed by engineers S. Berkovich and R. Muftakhov, the building resembles an image of a flying saucer – a fine reference to the Soviet advances in space and technology that gave rise to the fashion for modernism.

Another example of modernist dome architecture in Tashkent is the Chorsu Bazaar, with its single large and seven small domes designed by V. Azimov and S. Adylov. Chorsu’s unique, ‘town-like’ design is created by an alternation of covered, open and semi-open spaces with a complex network of galleries, viewing areas, staircases and passages between them.

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