This city in Central Asia is an unexpected goldmine of modernist architecture

When the House of Cinema in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, was demolished in 2017, it was an architectural awakening for the city. A large circular concrete building completed in 1982, the House of Cinema was an instant cultural and architectural landmark in the city, then part of the Soviet Union. Its demolition, to make way for a controversial commercial development project, spurred many in the city to worry about which landmark would fall next.

That led the Uzbekistan Art and Culture Development Foundation to launch a citywide research project to document endangered buildings. Most were built between the late 1960s and early 1980s when the Soviet Union sought to frame its ambitions through civic architecture. Many buildings from this time embraced modernism, with swooping facades, inventive structural forms, and artful mosaic panels adorning interiors and exteriors. As public buildings, their fates were at the whims of government leaders eager to develop the city into a 21st century economic powerhouse, which is how the House of Cinema was destroyed.

To try to stop others from falling, the Uzbekistan Art and Culture Development Foundation funded a team of international researchers, historians, and architects to undertake Tashkent Modernism XX/XXI, a research project documenting the city’s modernist structures, and rallying for their preservation.

“The concentration of modernist architecture is very high in Tashkent, but what truly sets it apart is the remarkable number of well-planned, innovative, and elegantly designed public buildings,” says architect Ekaterina Golovatyuk, one of the experts involved in the project and a co-founder of Grace Studio, a Milan-based architecture, design, and urbanism firm.

Underway since 2018, the research project has documented 24 key modernist sites across the city. Of those, 21 have secured national heritage site status, along with 154 mosaic panels, protecting them from demolition.

These buildings, and the ongoing effort to save them, is the subject of a pair of new books, Tashkent: A Modernist Capital, published by Rizzoli New York, and Tashkent Modernism XX/XXI, published by Lars Müller Publishers. The books reveal Tashkent as an under appreciated hotbed of modernist architecture, and a historical turning point for both Soviet and post-Soviet Central Asia.

At one point the fourth largest city in the Soviet Union, Tashkent was chosen in the 1950s as a showcase of the “Soviet Orient,” which resulted in an architectural boom. “The city was meant to demonstrate how well socialism could adapt to a different cultural context,” Golovatyuk says. “This initiated a very interesting search for local identity, contended between architects from Tashkent and Moscow. The result was a transformation of traditional architectural elements within the framework of a modernist language.”

This building spree took on new urgency in 1966 when a massive earthquake damaged much of the city. The city’s recovery coincided with a Soviet Union-wide emphasis on prefabricated building and new forms of construction, leaving Tashkent with a wide variety of inventive and modern buildings.

The Tashkent Modernism XX/XXI research project has put this legacy under a new spotlight, helping to save many buildings from demolition while also underscoring their significance as the city grows. Some of these buildings are also being seen in a broader context. Golovatyuk and Giacomo Cantoni, co-founder of Grace Studio, were recently named curators of Uzbekistan’s national pavilion at the upcoming Venice Architecture Biennale. Their exhibition will focus on one project included in the research project, a large-scale scientific complex outside Tashkent known as the Sun Heliocomplex. Dedicated to studying solar energy, it was ahead of its time in both design and intention.

Golovatyuk says this project and others that are being saved through the Tashkent Modernism XX/XXI research project are finding new relevance, especially within Uzbekistan, where contemporary architects are building on their heritage. “I think the search for national identity restarted almost from scratch when Uzbekistan gained independence in 1991,” says Golovatyuk, who first visited Tashkent in 2006. “Many buildings have sought to establish continuity with the pre-Soviet past through ornamentation, probably in a more exuberant manner than during the modernist period.”

An emerging generation of young architects is taking particular inspiration from the buildings being preserved through the Tashkent Modernism XX/XXI research project, creating what Golovatyuk calls “a more sophisticated dialogue with both tradition and the modernist past.”

The effort to save and recognize these buildings is city-specific for Tashkent, where modernism is now a kind of calling card. But it’s also a fight that exists in cities around the world, such as Philadelphia, where an internationally renowned police headquarters building is losing a long preservation battle, and Boston, where the government center complex is a perennial demolition target.

“A few of these buildings faced at least some risk of transformation, but I believe it is to be expected. The city has been undergoing rapid growth for the past eight years, there is significant pressure on all real estate,” Golovatyuk says. “This kind of pressure is the fate of modernism not only in Tashkent, but worldwide.” The research project’s success in securing protected status for Tashkent’s modernist buildings could be a playbook for other cities to follow.

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