Philipp Meuser (Managing Director of Meuser Architekten GmbH and Head of DOM publishers)
Re-building of Tashkent
Experimental laboratory
Demolition of the oriental through planning
Radical urban development
Soviet megapolis
Elaborately adorned apartment blocks
City of two centres
Constructivism realised
New layer on old Islamic
New layer of urban design and scale
Disjuncture
New power = mew typologies of building
Palace of Culture
Serial mass housing. First generation
Prefabrication. One hundred percent
Imported from France
Always a system
Assemblage
Earthquake.
Epicentre in city centre
Three weeks.
Part of soviet propaganda
City centres = empty green spaces
Culture in from of stationary objects
Focus of propaganda on architecture
City of ‘friendship of nations’
Nations invited to send architects
Nations forced to send architects
Imported patterns and philosophy
Local typologies of prefabrication
‘modernisation’ of local traditions
Utopian Tashkent
Tashkent of the future
Tourist attraction
Society modernised by politics
Society modernised by architecture
Vitruvian man as a space man
Meuser, Philipp, Seismic modernism: architecture and housing in Soviet Tashkent, (Berlin: DOM Publishers, 2016).