Chorsu Market in Tashkent – All photos are by © Karel Balas, unless stated. Courtesy of Uzbekistan ACDF.
Architecture. Uzbekistan has just become the first Central Asian country to see its twentieth-century architecture inscribed on UNESCO’s World Heritage List, with ten modernist buildings in the Uzbek capital, Tashkent. Dating from 1966 to 1990, these monumental structures are defined by striking light-filled interiors, bold concrete volumes, and intricate patterns. A dream destination for architecture lovers.
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People’s Friendship Palace.
The UNESCO-listed ensemble includes museums, research institutes, a market, a metro station, cultural venues, and even a residential tower. Together, they map something bigger than any single typology. “These buildings record how Tashkent imagined public life, collective identity and the future through architecture,” says Gayane Umerova, Chairperson of the Uzbekistan Art and Culture Development Foundation (ACDF).
Inside the Heliocomplex Sun.
Tashkent modernism doesn’t begin, as is often assumed, with the earthquake of 26 April 1966. It accelerates there. Plans already underway were suddenly given room to expand, reshaping the capital through broad avenues, public squares, planted courtyards, housing blocks and civic buildings, all testing the technical limits of prefabrication, reinforced concrete and seismic engineering.
Tashkent Central Exhibition Hall of the Academy of Arts.
What sets the Tashkent modernist canon apart from its Soviet contemporaries is its surface — ceramic, mosaic, carved and cast detailing that ties the concrete firmly back to Uzbek craft traditions.
State Museum of History.
UNESCO recognition followed five years of research led by the Uzbekistan ACDF, with contributions to the documentation effort from the Milan-based studio Grace, academic Boris Chukhovich, the Politecnico di Milano, and Laboratorio Permanente.
Heliocomplex Sun, 1987
Courtesy of Ubekistan ACDF.
In the foothills east of the capital, the Heliocomplex Sun ranks among the largest solar furnaces on earth – probably the most ambitious one. A colossal parabolic mirror channels sunlight into the intense heat required for materials research, while the setting itself becomes part of the architectural and artistic proposition — engineering staged as spectacle. Inside, light-filled, striking interiors are in dialogue with monumental, solar-power-inspired artworks.
People’s Friendship Palace, 1981
Yevgeny Rozanov‘s most ambitious work is Tashkent’s largest congress and concert venue, a quintessential example of Brezhnev-era architecture. The building is wrapped in a technologically inspired façade punctuated by concrete motifs resembling bolt heads. Inside, Soviet modernism encounters traditional patterns.
This monumental building, through which the Moscow architect interpreted Uzbekistan’s architectural traditions, has survived largely unchanged. The Palace is notable not only for its striking aesthetic but also for the innovative construction techniques employed in its realisation.
State Circus, 1975
Genrikh Aleksandrovich and Gennady Masyagin refused the standard Moscow-approved circus template, and the city is better for it. Their UFO-shaped, 3,000-seat State Circus pairs steel with reinforced concrete to meet Tashkent’s own seismic and climatic demands — proof that local conditions could still win the argument.
Alisher Navoi Cinema Palace, 1964
The earliest entry in the group, this cinema palace by Vladimir Beryozin answered a very specific technical brief: panoramic cinema. Its cylindrical volume and 2,300-seat auditorium capture a moment when Tashkent architecture turned decisively towards innovation, technology and the sheer theatre of the moving image.
Chorsu Market, 1990
Vladimir Azimov and Sabir Adylov closed out the group with this late-modern market, raised on the site of a historic bazaar at the heart of the old city. A striking green dome shelters the hall below, where the exposed steel frame is left proudly on display.
Central Exhibition Hall of the Academy of Arts, 1974
Rafael Khayrutdinov and F Tursunov raised this multi-level exhibition hall on a civic podium tucked into a small garden. Pleated façades dressed in geometric and floral mosaic root the composition firmly within the city’s long tradition of monumental decorative art.
State Museum of History, 1970
Yevgeny Rozanov and Vsevolod Shestopalov treated this museum as an urban hinge, slotted between two of Tashkent’s principal squares. One of the earliest modernist Lenin museums built anywhere in the Soviet Union, it wraps unapologetically bold concrete volumes in a latticed façade drawn from regional geometric patterns.
State Museum of Arts, 1974
Now headquarters to the Uzbekistan Art and Culture Development Foundation, this composition of square geometries unfolds around a four-storey atrium. Designed by Iskander Abdulov and Anatoly Nikiforov, the museum is modernist abstraction pushed into direct dialogue with the mathematical order, experimental materials and deep architectural traditions of Central Asia.
Metro station Prospekt of Cosmonauts, 1984
Spartak Ziganshin‘s underground station is a complete environment in its own right, wrapped in blue ceramic tile and glass-clad columns. Light and relief work dedicated to Soviet space pioneers turn a purely functional piece of transport infrastructure into a small narrative of flight and collective ambition.
Zhemchug Residential Building, 1985
Courtesy of Uzbekistan ACDF.
Ophelia Aidinova‘s sixteen-storey tower translates the mahalla — Central Asia’s traditional low-rise housing, built around family and community ties — into a monolithic concrete structure. Its suspended communal courtyards keep that same social logic alive several storeys above street level.
All photos are courtesy of Uzbekistan ACDF, Credit © Karel Balas, unless stated otherwise.
State Circus in Tashkent – Courtesy of Uzbekistan ACDF, Credit © Karel Balas.
