Tbilisi Roads Ministry Building
Encyclopedia
Tbilisi
Tbilisi is the capital and the largest city of Georgia, lying on the banks of the Mt'k'vari River. The name is derived from an early Georgian form T'pilisi and it was officially known as Tiflis until 1936...
, Georgia
Georgia (country)
Georgia is a sovereign state in the Caucasus region of Eurasia. Located at the crossroads of Western Asia and Eastern Europe, it is bounded to the west by the Black Sea, to the north by Russia, to the southwest by Turkey, to the south by Armenia, and to the southeast by Azerbaijan. The capital of...
. It was designed by architects George Chakhava and Zurab Jalaghania for the Ministry of Highway Construction of Georgian SSR and finished in 1975. The engineer was Temur Tkhilava. Today it is a property of the Bank of Georgia
Bank of Georgia
JSC Bank of Georgia is a leading Georgian universal bank, providing a full range of commercial and investment banking, wealth management, insurance, trade finance, leasing and card processing services to its corporate and retail clients...
. The building is planned to have a new main entrance and underground lobby, as well as being completely renovated inside to a modern office space. The current renovation and design is under the direction of Architectural Group and Partners.
History
George Chakhava was the Minister of highway construction in the 1970s. Therefore, he was both the client and the lead architect of this project. He could chose the site location best suited for the design himself. The building costs were 6 mio RubleRuble
The ruble or rouble is a unit of currency. Currently, the currency units of Belarus, Russia, Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Transnistria, and, in the past, the currency units of several other countries, notably countries influenced by Russia and the Soviet Union, are named rubles, though they all are...
.
In 2007 the building was conferred National Monument status under the National Monuments Acts. For 2009 a renovation and extension to 15.600 m2 was planned but not implemented.
Architect
George Chakhava (გიორგი ჩახავა) studied architecture at the State Polytechnical University in Tbilisi and graduated in 1949. Since then he has worked as an architect with his own studio and realized projects in GeorgiaGeorgia (country)
Georgia is a sovereign state in the Caucasus region of Eurasia. Located at the crossroads of Western Asia and Eastern Europe, it is bounded to the west by the Black Sea, to the north by Russia, to the southwest by Turkey, to the south by Armenia, and to the southeast by Azerbaijan. The capital of...
as well as in Ukraine
Ukraine
Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It has an area of 603,628 km², making it the second largest contiguous country on the European continent, after Russia...
, Uzbekistan
Uzbekistan
Uzbekistan , officially the Republic of Uzbekistan is a doubly landlocked country in Central Asia and one of the six independent Turkic states. It shares borders with Kazakhstan to the west and to the north, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan to the east, and Afghanistan and Turkmenistan to the south....
, Tajikistan
Tajikistan
Tajikistan , officially the Republic of Tajikistan , is a mountainous landlocked country in Central Asia. Afghanistan borders it to the south, Uzbekistan to the west, Kyrgyzstan to the north, and China to the east....
, Afghanistan
Afghanistan
Afghanistan , officially the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, is a landlocked country located in the centre of Asia, forming South Asia, Central Asia and the Middle East. With a population of about 29 million, it has an area of , making it the 42nd most populous and 41st largest nation in the world...
and Livia. He claims that his main inspiration is the unique nature of my country with its individuality and beauty of each region in harmony with mountain villages. I was always amazed by the ordinary Georgian peasant's ability to build the house where the most expressive landscape was opened, sometimes preferring the nature's beauty to the living convenience. That is why the mastering of complicated relief became the defined moment of my creative work. On my view, the more relief is complicated, the more possibilities have the architect. Chakhava received several Honoration and awards. He was honored by the Union of the Architects of USSR, 1983 he received the State Prize of the USSR Council of Ministers
USSR State Prize
The USSR State Prize was the Soviet Union's state honour. It was established on September 9, 1966. After the breakup of the Soviet Union, the prize was followed up by the State Prize of the Russian Federation....
. The Georgian Union of Architects awarded him with a medal for "The Special honor in Architecture". In 1991 he became Honored Member of the International Academy of the Architecture of the Oriental countries. Chakhava died at the 25th of August 2007.
Description
The wooded site lies in the outskirts of Tbilisi at the river Kura RiverKura River
Kura is a river, also known from the Greek as the Cyrus in the Caucasus Mountains. Starting in north-eastern Turkey, it flows through Turkey to Georgia, then to Azerbaijan, where it receives the Aras River as a right tributary, and enters the Caspian Sea...
. It has a steep slope, declining from West to East. Big parts of the building are lifted off the ground, the landscape runs through beneath. The structure is visible from far, three major roads leading from Tbilisi to the north pass the site. The building can be entered from both sites, at the higher and lower end.
The structure consists of a monumental grid of interlocking concrete forms. Five horizontal parts with two storeys each seem to be stapled on top of each other. Three parts are oriented at an east-west axis, at a right angle to the slope, two are north-south oriented, along the slope. The structure rests on and hangs from three cores. They contain the vertical circulation elements like stairs and elevators. The highest core has 18 storeys. The building has a floor area of 10.960 sqm.
Architecture
The concept that the landscape or nature "flows" through under the building was used by other architects, too. Le Corbusier
Le Corbusier
Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, better known as Le Corbusier , was a Swiss-born French architect, designer, urbanist, writer and painter, famous for being one of the pioneers of what now is called modern architecture. He was born in Switzerland and became a French citizen in 1930...
worked theoretically on the "house on pilotis" and realized this idea for example from 1947 on in the Unité d'Habitation
Unité d'Habitation
The Unité d'Habitation is the name of a modernist residential housing design principle developed by Le Corbusier, with the collaboration of painter-architect Nadir Afonso...
. Frank Lloyd Wright
Frank Lloyd Wright
Frank Lloyd Wright was an American architect, interior designer, writer and educator, who designed more than 1,000 structures and completed 500 works. Wright believed in designing structures which were in harmony with humanity and its environment, a philosophy he called organic architecture...
used a similar idea at Fallingwater
Fallingwater
Fallingwater or Kaufmann Residence is a house designed by architect Frank Lloyd Wright in 1935 in rural southwestern Pennsylvania, 50 miles southeast of Pittsburgh...
in 1935. Glenn Murcutt
Glenn Murcutt
Glenn Marcus Murcutt AO is a British-born Australian architect and winner of the 2002 Pritzker Prize and 2009 AIA Gold Medal.-Biography:...
used the proverb Touch This Earth Lightly literally in some of his designs. A current example is the Musée du quai Branly
Musée du quai Branly
thumb|225px|Musée du quai BranlyThe Musée du quai Branly , known in English as the Quai Branly Museum, nicknamed MQB, is a museum in Paris, France that features indigenous art, cultures and civilizations from Africa, Asia, Oceania, and the Americas. The museum is located at 37, quai Branly -...
by Jean Nouvel
Jean Nouvel
Jean Nouvel is a French architect. Nouvel studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and was a founding member of Mars 1976 and Syndicat de l'Architecture...
in Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
, where a garden lays beneath a building.
The design goes back to ideas of the Russian constructivists
Constructivist architecture
Constructivist architecture was a form of modern architecture that flourished in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and early 1930s. It combined advanced technology and engineering with an avowedly Communist social purpose. Although it was divided into several competing factions, the movement produced...
from the 1920s. The architect El Lissitzky
El Lissitzky
, better known as El Lissitzky , was a Russian artist, designer, photographer, typographer, polemicist and architect. He was an important figure of the Russian avant garde, helping develop suprematism with his mentor, Kazimir Malevich, and designing numerous exhibition displays and propaganda works...
designed with his Horizontal skyscrapers (Wolkenbügel) 1924 a structure that looks very similar. He also divided the cores and office areas in vertical and horizontal elements as an antithese to the American concept of the Skyscraper
Skyscraper
A skyscraper is a tall, continuously habitable building of many stories, often designed for office and commercial use. There is no official definition or height above which a building may be classified as a skyscraper...
.
The Style can be called "post-constructivist
Constructivist architecture
Constructivist architecture was a form of modern architecture that flourished in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and early 1930s. It combined advanced technology and engineering with an avowedly Communist social purpose. Although it was divided into several competing factions, the movement produced...
" and it is one of the best examples of this architectural concept in the city. Based on the use of fairfaced concrete and the sharp, geometrical volumes the building can also be considered as part of the Brutalism movement. The concept of the space city has strong connections to Structuralism
Structuralism (architecture)
Structuralism as a movement in architecture and urban planning evolved around the middle of the 20th century. It was a reaction to CIAM-Functionalism , which had led to a lifeless expression of urban planning that ignored the identity of the inhabitants and urban forms.Two different manifestations...
. Between Brutalism and Structuralism similar buildings were also built in other countries, for example the Yamanashi communication centre in Kofu by Kenzo Tange
Kenzo Tange
was a Japanese architect, and winner of the 1987 Pritzker Prize for architecture. He was one of the most significant architects of the 20th century, combining traditional Japanese styles with modernism, and designed major buildings on five continents. Tange was also an influential protagonist of...
or Habitat 67 by Moshe Safdie
Moshe Safdie
Moshe Safdie, CC, FAIA is an architect, urban designer, educator, theorist, and author. Born in the city of Haifa, then Palestine and now Israel, he moved with his family to Montreal, Canada, when he was 15 years old.-Career:...
, both finished in 1967.
Udo Kultermann, a German author, sees also a formal connection to the user of the building. The structure represents in his opinion the internal use by the formal reference to streets and bridges. Describing the building Nikolai Ouroussoff, a New York Times's architecture critic, said: "Rising on an incline between two highways, the building’s heavy cantilevered forms reflect the Soviet-era penchant for heroic scale. Yet they also relate sensitively to their context, celebrating the natural landscape that flows directly underneath the building. The composition of interlocking forms, conceived as a series of bridges, brings to mind the work of the Japanese Metabolists
Metabolist Movement
In the late 1950s a small group of young Japanese architects and designers joined forces under the title of "Metabolism". Their visions for cities of the future inhabited by a mass society were characterized by large scale, flexible, and expandable structures that evoked the processes of organic...
of the late ’60s and early ’70s, proof that Soviet architects weren’t working in an intellectual vacuum."
Frozen Moments
It was the site of a contemporary art exhibition, "Frozen Moments: Architecture Speaks Back" in July 2010.Frozen moments: Architecture Speaks Back was a project organized by the Other Space Foundation in cooperation with the Laura Palmer Foundation in Poland addressing and taking place in the enigmatic Ministry of Transportation building in Tbilisi, Georgia. The Ministry of Transportation building is viewed by many Georgians as an eyesore and relic of the Soviet era, although many young Georgian artists admire the building. Recently bought by the Bank of Georgia, the building has somehow been turned over to a week of cross platform installations, performances, talks and activities that address the building and a constellation of political, economic, aesthetic and architectural associations. The project was financed by the Polish Ministry of Culture, the City of Warsaw
Warsaw
Warsaw is the capital and largest city of Poland. It is located on the Vistula River, roughly from the Baltic Sea and from the Carpathian Mountains. Its population in 2010 was estimated at 1,716,855 residents with a greater metropolitan area of 2,631,902 residents, making Warsaw the 10th most...
and the Culture Program of the EC.
Controversions
The project is alleged actually stolen from a non-implemented one in PraguePrague
Prague is the capital and largest city of the Czech Republic. Situated in the north-west of the country on the Vltava river, the city is home to about 1.3 million people, while its metropolitan area is estimated to have a population of over 2.3 million...
district Košíře
Košíre
Košíře is a part of a municipal area Prague 5. It is situated in a valley of Motol brook between the city quarters Smíchov and Motol. Košíře was an autonomous city during 1896-1921.- History :...
of Czech architect Karel Prager.
Literature
- Coverstory of Time Europe 8.3.1976: It's a hard live for Ivan - Ultramodern office complex under construction in Tblisi
- Arthur Drexler: Transformations in modern architecture, Paperback, 168 pages, Distributed by New York Graphic Society (1979), ISBN 978-0-87070-608-0
- Udo Kultermann: Zeitgenössische Architektur in Osteuropa (DuMont Dokumente) (DE), Cologne, DuMont 1985, 254 pages, ISBN 978-3-7701-1554-9
- Architecture magazine domusDomus (magazine)Domus is the name of two magazines, one published in Italy and one in the United States.* Domus is an Italian magazine, first published in 1928, which focuses on design and architecture. It is bilingual, with articles printed in both Italian and English....
, (IT/EN) Issue 577, Dec 1977, Pages 36,37