Tashkent Cultural Trail

Cultural trail is part of the broader project Tashkent Modernism XX/XXI, funded by The Uzbekistan Art and Culture Development Foundation, with the aim of preserving modernist architecture in the Uzbek capital. Tashkent’s modernist heritage is not limited to a vast collection of highly valuable buildings but also includes a unique urban structure that connects these architectures through a complex system of public spaces and green corridors.

While on the surface, preserving this heritage through a regulatory apparatus may seem the path of most excellent protection, a simple regulatory system can easily be subject over a short time to varying degrees of reversibility triggered by cultural, social, and economic changes that are difficult to foreshadow today.

As an alternative or in addition to this mode, it is possible to proceed along a more ambitious but more robust path: to recognize the existing network of buildings and open spaces as the support for a new environmental and cultural enhancement project for the city. We called this project the Cultural Trail.

A design rewrite of the architecture and urban spaces as a single whole that compose this palimpsest can enable the elaboration of a new urban vision capable of expressing contemporary values while preserving the historical heritage of modernism.

Set within the open spaces surrounding the Museum of Arts of Uzbekistan, the pilot intervention is a case study to test materials, urban configurations, furnishings, and greenery envisioned along the entire cultural trail.
An equipped green axis structures the park’s northern edge, narrowing the street section and introducing community tables, resting areas, and green rooms.

The proposed transformation faces the museum entrance and replaces the existing flowerbeds with a vast mineral carpet beneath both existing and new trees. A large reflecting pool mirrors the regular geometries of the museum’s historic façade, while a new staircase leads to a public balcony.

If the most potent form of preservation passes through the broadest sharing of the relevance of a place or artifact, it is precisely through a design gaze that it is possible to generate this awareness: the project is the most effective tool for revealing the potential of historical legacy to the society that inherited it and lives within it, assigning it values, urgencies and visions of its contemporaneity.