If you don't know where you are, you don't know who you are. With a sense of place, your identity is defined - to a significant extent - by the natural features of the place you live. Without a sense of place, what will fill the void? Wendell Berry (Garden State Earth Institute, Discovering a Sense of Place)
It takes the mind of a poet to truly understand the subtlety and beauty of Tashkent with its 2000-year-old history as a crossroad of ancient trade routes until today, growing developing modern city - the capital of Uzbekistan. The culture and traditions reflected on architectural surfaces frame the city's poetic character, helping to instil a sense of harmony between nature and the works of man - architecture. The old part of the city is a maze of narrow dusty streets lined by low, mud brick houses, mosques and medressas (Islamic academies). The Oriental Islamic architecture is contrasted and complemented by the modern flavor of the new city. There are timeless traditions of Islamic Architecture that can still be identified in Tashkent, despite the fact that the city has experienced major transformations in history, responded to modernization and adjusted to the conditions, altering its cultural features. Even contemporary buildings, adapted to Tashkent contain their own poetic features, and encouraging these will see Tashkent develop into a city that is both modern and poetic.
Tashkent's unique sense of identity is defined by its history and complex power relationships that have been negotiated in time by different people. It manifests itself through architecture, which reflects its traditions, cultural heritage and values. Tashkent's architecture resonates a sense of compromise, filtering through and distorting the monolithic geometric order of Modernism in search of harmony and balance, qualities that bring comfort and stability to people's reality. In fact, it is impossible to analyze a city without taking into account the human aspects. People's experiences and emotions, reacting to and acting on the geography or architecture itself, constitute a sense of place in Tashkent or in any other place. People add a dynamic factor to architecture, without a need to rationalize and consciously understand the geometric order. They live it, understanding its rhythms, its potential, and its limits. Through their activities they communicate to others a secret or being, without being able to tell a secret objectively.
Place is a fundamental experience of being. Being in place is being present. It implies participation with place. Interaction. And intimacy. (Jackson 1997: Sense of Place)
My purpose in this thesis is to understand the impact of architecture on the everyday life of people in Tashkent, from the perspective of social science; to illustrate the distinction between Islamic Architectural Craft and Modernist design Aesthetics that influence the city formation and fabric, to demonstrate to the architects the greater impact of their practices on culture in Tashkent and to explore some possibilities of enrichment of everyday life.
Context and Literature
To discuss place is to discuss not only its design and architecture, but also philosophy, psychology, history, community and phenomenology. It is perfectly possible that another person with different set of goals and expectations would single out concepts entirely different from those I have chosen myself. If we take a phenomenological approach, we can look at architecture / design from the perspective of consciousness, cognition, mental and spiritual aspects of architecture. Places with meanings are called poetic places. (Pivot Interiors Making a Place 2002) Therefore this thesis observes the process of place making, an act of creating meaningful environment, through a conscious acknowledgement of the impact of design on that environment. This is what I am looking for in the architecture in Tashkent. Our ability to conceptualize our own surroundings, re-visualizing, redefining our places through place making can be a tool for regaining a sense of place, and strengthens our connection with our traditional roots. The approach that bridges the mental and a physical aspects of place, that this thesis takes, adopts key concepts of French philosophers such as Henry Lefebvre, Michel de Certeau, Gaston Barnard and Situationists Internationale. Their observations of the architectural everyday guided my research and allowed to balance between academic theory, my own experiences and the analysis of the ordinary everyday life of people in Tashkent.
Methodology
The major part of this thesis conforms to the guidelines of the academic discipline. But at the same time it contains the inspirational quotes, like those that were presented above, which manipulate the mechanisms of the discipline, not to destroy or take it over entirely, but to temporary subvert its power, allowing time for creative thinking and imagination, when you, as a reader can wonder in the direction it leads you and explore the infinite possibilities of interpreting Tashkent. This is taken even further in the more experimental chapter 5, where I attempt to express the human emotions that are reflected in interpretation. Therefore, it required a new method, which became cultural studies, that adds to the experience of reading.
Chapter Outlines:
No discussion of Tashkent can take place without an understanding of just how the city came to be, historical and cultural forces that shaped it, and how important the city's architecture is to the well-being and identity of its people. Therefore chapter one will address the questions of religion, communist ideology, economic and social conditions, art and science that will allow to define Uzbek national identity and culture and their influence on architecture.
Chapter two discusses the two approaches to urban form used through history in Uzbekistan: Ancient Islamic Tradition and Russian - Modernism. This chapter examines the characteristics, geometries created by these practices, and their significance in shaping the urban fabric of Tashkent.
The next chapter entitled "Compromising Modernism" explores ways Uzbek architects responded to modernization, appropriating modernist architectural feature to enhance, the town's existing character. It also considers how "Compromising Modernism" becomes a separate discipline that dominated architectural practice in Uzbekistan and its impact on lives of people.
The chapter "Contemporary Architectural Practices - Reception of the Post-Modern" is concerned with the modern vocabulary of architecture. Therefore this chapter analyses the language of architecture that allows us to read the signs and symbols of architecture. This chapter pays special attention to advantages, disadvantages and the construction of social meaning for architecture.
Chapter 5, investigates the interpretations of the city environment in a social context; the construction of people's individual sentences, (experiences of space in the city) with an established vocabulary and syntax. The objective for this part of the thesis assumes that users of architecture make transformations of and within the available space in order to adapt it to their own interests and their own rules. Here we try to determine these procedures of everyday creativity, reader's practices related to urban spaces, activities deflecting the power of design aesthetic by means of 'tactics' of everyday life.
To conclude the recommendations arising from the research will be presented for architects to learn to understand the city not as pure geometry, or grid, but realize that the social, individual aspect of architecture overpowers its aesthetics and to adapt these observations to architectural practices will bring the interests of city developers and culture and history preservationists together, letting the city maintain its individuality and sense of place, as well as allowing it to grow and be proud of its power as well as old preserved heritage.