Tashkent hopes to draw tourists to its modernist buildings

Capital of Uzbekistan undergoes drive to preserve cultural heritage

2024-01-15 Exhibition Hall of the Union of Artists, Tashkent.jpg

This photo, showing the Exhibition Hall of the Union of Artists on the left, was one of a series that was first presented at the Tashkent Modernism.Index exhibition that took place in Milan in April and in Tashkent in October. (Photo by Armin Linke)

PAUL BARTLETT, Contributing writer

January 21, 2024 12:00 JST

TASHKENT -- The tearing down of the iconic movie theater Dom Kino to make way for a business park in 2017 alarmed those who loved Tashkent's modernist architecture, a collection of Soviet-era civic buildings.

They needn't have worried. Six years later, Tashkent's architecture is being recast as a tourist draw. An app that helps tourists navigate a route around the key buildings was recently launched by Uzbekistan's Art and Culture Development Foundation together with a group of international architects and academics under the Tashkent Modernism XX/XXI project.