Tour Uzbekistan’s modernist architecture in Tashkent

The legacy of modernist architecture in Uzbekistan and its capital, Tashkent, is explored through research, a new publication, and the country's upcoming pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025; here, we take a tour of its riches

BY WILL JENNINGS

The capital of Uzbekistan, Tashkent, is a city undergoing rapid redevelopment. Developer-led projects – of occasional dubious quality and architectural aspiration – are rising across the city and its environs, and with such a pace of change, it can easily be the case that the historical layers and buildings of a city can be lost. The Uzbekistan Art and Culture Development Foundation (ACDF) with the support of Milan-based architects Grace, led by Ekaterina Golovatyuk and Giacomo Cantoni, are on a mission to ensure that the rich examples of Soviet-era modernist architecture are not forgotten as the city moves into a new era.

ACDF, led by Gayane Umerova, funded a team of international researchers, historians, and architects to document the city’s modernist structures, and rally for their preservation which has grown into an exercise with many faces: a Unesco World Heritage bid; an app to engage local residents; local training in conservation techniques; richly presented exhibitions; and the focus of Uzbekistan’s pavilion for the upcoming Venice Architecture Biennale 2025.

Explore the modernist architecture in Uzbekistan

While Tashkent’s history reaches back over 2,000 years, the Soviet imprint in the urban fabric is present. A widescale rebuild following a devastating 1966 earthquake led to the construction of numerous grand architectural gestures with an ambition to become the ‘Moscow of the East’.

Fusing bold modernist form and material with subtle gestures speaking to the heritage and aesthetics of a nation rooted in the Silk Road and Islamic architecture, the Unesco bid – to be accompanied by a new book presenting the research alongside images by Armin Linke from Lars Müller Publishers – is designed to both recognise the heritage as well as develop a framework for respecting, restoring, and understanding it as the city reinvents itself again.

Altogether, the ten buildings below offer a rich study of late-Soviet modernism that speaks to the ambition and reach of the state, but with detail, ornamentation, and design touches that convey Uzbek and Islamic vernaculars. Scroll down for some of the country’s modernist highlights.

Modernist architecture in Uzbekistan: 10 highlights

Hotel Uzbekistan, 1974

Architects: Ilya Merport, Vyacheslav Roschupkin, Ludmila Ershova

Towering over the city, and providing accommodation for most international visitors, the curved brise-soleil façade of Hotel Uzbekistan makes the hotel the most impactful and dominant landmark of Tashkent Modernism. With a steel construction and anti-seismic features, it is designed to be resistant to the forces of nature, though the forces of development have caused some damage – renovations in the 1990s and 2010s saw the interior gutted of carvings, mosaics, and stained glass, while a glorious pool and tearoom have been demolished.

Tashkent Metro, 1972

Architects: various

The Tashkent Metro may be a great modernist symbol of a progressive, global city, but it is also one that carries a rich and ornamental respect for the region’s history, craft, and architecture. Now a sprawling system of over 58km, stations from the 1970s and 80s each offer a unique experience, including Pakhtakor station’s rotunda, full of abstract mosaics celebrating the cotton industry, and the People’s Friendship station formed of traditional geometry speaking to the ancient cities of Samarqand and Bukhara.

Richly illuminated in cosmic themes, celebrating astronautical endeavour, is the Kosmonavtlar station designed by Sergo Sutyagin and Sergei Sokolov. With top-lit columns wrapped in glass to add a sense of weightlessness, and walls decorated with 12 large frescoes acknowledging those who propelled the Soviets into space – including Valentina Terashkova, the first female cosmonaut – set onto a mosaic tile gradient that seems to dissolve into a dark, night sky.

Palace of People’s Friendship, 1981

Architects: Yevgeny Rozanov, Elena Sukhanova

Standing proud at the head of a large public plaza within the post-earthquake Soviet plan, no expense was spared in the creation of a grand, ornate, and somewhat baroque monument. A near-square plan is wrapped in a decorative sunshade and cornice that fuses sci-fi futurism with Islamic tradition, the monochrome rhythm concealing an ornate, spectacular interior. Then and still a place for public events, forums, and concerts, a vivid sensorial overload awaits visitors. An internal lobby of rich blue ceramics, glistening glass chandeliers, gilded detail, marble, and ceramic murals leads into the main auditorium of over 4,000 seats under a rupturing ceiling with a dynamic interplay of light and shade.

State Circus, 1969

Architect: Genrikj Aleksandrovich

Located not far from the larger dome of Chorsu Market, though offering an entirely different civic function, the State Circus is still packed daily with excitable children. Though slightly roughed-up from the daily footfall of tiny shoes, and as with the other modernist examples slightly altered unsympathetically in the post-Independence period – here, the roof was painted turquoise. While the outside has a sculptural space-age aesthetic, the inside is richly ornamental with geometric ceramics, murals of historic circus entertainment, stained glass windows illuminating it all, and decorative archways that seem to suck the audience into the amphitheatre.

Zhemchug Residential Building, 1985

Architect: Ophelia Aydinova

The only domestic architecture on the country’s Unesco list, this 16-storey tower may represent a new progressive verticality for late-Soviet Tashkent, but its formal inspiration is the traditional residences of the city. Each three-storey section of the block has its own courtyard, open to the elements on two sides, and offering a shared space akin to the courtyards within traditional Central Asian mahalla neighbourhoods, communal spaces complete with planting boxes, climbing frames, and space for coming together. On top of it all is a habitable rooftop that would impress even Le Corbusier, including a swimming pool that passes under a bridge. It is clearly much loved by residents who hope that a successful Unesco listing will help them restore and repair the remarkable block.

Central Exhibition Hall of the Academy of Arts, 1974

Architects: Rafael Khairutdinov, Farhad Tursunov

After Leonid Brezhnev succeeded Nikita Kruschev as General Secretary of the Communist Party in 1964, authorities and architects slowly switched from international minimalism towards an aesthetic incorporating patterns, motifs, and decoration speaking to regionalist styles. The Central Exhibition Hall speaks to this development, the surrounding arcade formed of pointed arches referencing Islamic geometry, and a rhythmic façade pattern inspired by the local cotton industry. Inside, a two-level hall acted as a sculpture gallery, leading to exhibition spaces with rooflights providing natural light to works on show, and openable to allow natural vertical ventilation during summer months.

Big Solar Furnace, 1987

Architect: Viktor Zakharov

This one is not in Tashkent but 40km to the east in Parkent, and some may argue it’s more of an experiment than a building – but it’s too spectacular and unique not to include in the list. High in the foothills of the Tien Shan – a site chosen for the clean air, days of sunlight, and security when there are tremors – is this enormous sun-reflecting piece of engineering. An array of 62 south-facing mirrors reflect the sun back onto a vast concave parabolic mirror, which in turn focuses the rays to a single point reaching over 3,000°C.

It’s designed to aid scientific tests and develop new materials, but when Carlo Rati tasked participants in this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale to consider future intelligence, ACDF alongside Grace felt the nature-adjacent science of the place would suit – and so it is the focus of the Uzbekistan Pavilion. More than just an enormous set of mind-blowing mirrors, the complex also includes offices and conference facilities with some unexpectedly ornate and highly crafted glass and ceramic detail, with one of the glass chandeliers being transferred to Venice for restoration as part of the Biennale project.

Chorsu Market, 1983

Architect: Vladimir Azimov

Another monumental volume, visible from across the centre of Tashkent, is the city market – a vibrant, bustling arrangement of stallholders as busy now in free market capitalism as it was at the end of the Soviet regime, albeit with some 1990s architectural adjustments and additions to suit new economies. At the centre of a vast site that has been home to Tashkent’s bazaar since the age of the Silk Road, is the market’s main hall, a vast reinforced-concrete dome – inside a bewildering structure-celebrating geometry, and outside a decorative tiled roof that harks back to the ceramic heritage of the region.

Alisher Navoi Cinema Palace, 1964

Architects: Sergo Sutyagin, Vladimir Beryozin, Yuri Khaldeev, Dmitry Shuvaev, with the participation of Olga Legostaeva

Once home to the Tashkent International Film Festival for Asian and African countries and attracting up to 10,000 daily visitors in its heyday, this cinema auditorium also played host to symphonic orchestras and political gatherings. A futuristic shell designed to contain dreams and stories to come, in the mid-1970s it was added to with a new pavilion-like hall overlooking a split piazza. Designed by Sergo Sutyagin from the original design team, the extension now contains two smaller screens, with the grand central auditorium still used for concerts and major film events.

State Museum of Arts, 1974

Architects: Savely Rosenblum, Iskander Abdulov, Anatoly Nikiforov

On the outside, this museum seems underwhelming compared to the majesty of some of Tashkent’s other modernist examples – a 1990s façade encasement of columns and arches, unfortunately, concealing the original, experimental, and minimal grid of opaque glass panels and aluminium panels. The inside, however, is resplendent. A central atrium rises like a granite cliff with textured grey stone laid vertically to emphasise the height, deep floor plans offering space for a collection covering third-century sculpture to 20th-century Uzbek art, all softly lit by the diffused light – which it is hoped may return should the original façades be revealed and restored.

Tashkent Modernism XX/XXI, Boris Chukhovich, Davide del Curto & Ekaterina Golovatyuk (eds.), is available to preorder from Lars Müller Publishers, CHF60

This article is originally available at www.wallpaper.com