In Tbilisi, centuries of Persian, Soviet and contemporary architecture collide in a restless urban landscape. The grassroots Tbilisi Architecture Archive works to preserve the city’s fragile memory before its past disappears.
The Georgian capital was given many nicknames throughout its long history, from “the Paris of Caucasus” to “the warm city” (due to the sulphuric thermal waters it was funded on), to the crossroad between east and west. In all truth, the only fitting definition for Tbilisi is that of a layered, composite city. In the space of a brief stroll around the centre of the city, you can easily spot Persian, European, traditional Caucasian, Soviet and modern western architecture.
Tbilisi is also a city that keeps moving and changing – fast. Leaving each layer to be, at least partly, sacrificed to make room for the next. Historically, little has been done in the way of conservation. The result is a strange co-existence of old traditional terraced wooden homes with their coloured glass windows, often and sadly falling into pieces, and ultra-modern skyscrapers planned to put Tbilisi on the architectural world map – the latest designed by Zaha Hadid Architects. In the midst of all this, the popular chruščëvkas (simple concrete residential buildings built during Nikita Cruščëv’s presidency) and triumphal soviet architecture. To be fair, most soviet buildings have either been demolished, repurposed, often for commercial purposes, or are left abandoned – visited mostly, if not only, by brutalist architecture enthusiasts. Thus, as the face of the city keeps changing, the risk is forgetting the stages it went through, that so deeply defined its soul.
BUILDING A COLLECTIVE MEMORY: TBILISI ARCHITECTURE ARCHIVE
It is exactly to prevent this risk from turning into a reality that in 2020 Mariam Gegidze, Nino Tchatchkhiani and Natia Abasashvili co-founded the grassroots project Tbilisi Architecture Archive (TAA) – in Tchatchkhiani’s own words, “in order to build a collective memory of the city”. The Archive started as part of the 2020 Tbilisi Common Architecture Biennial. Gegidze explains how they “realised there is no archive, no centre, no gallery completely dedicated to architecture in Georgia, so we wanted to create something that could show the process of transformation of the city”. They called, and the Georgian family answered. The architects started getting drawings, projects, materials from personal archives and putting them together – “the next step was making them available to the public”. They did so by building a simple website: Tbilisi Architecture Archive was born. In the process, they ended up saving a huge number of precious materials that would have been wasted forever. “To our surprise” Gegidze reports, “we found out that many of the families were going to throw their personal archives away, to save space and for a perceived lack of interest”. Then they reached out to national archives too, and “the result was incredibly diverse in terms of the materials, projects, sources, but also information that we were able to put together”.
ARCHIVING, AN ANCIENT PRACTICE
The act of archiving – collecting, organising and preserving documents or information – traces back to the very beginning of civilisation, to Mesopotamia. That’s when human beings started putting together and conserving clay tablets in huge palace halls. This could also be why archiving is generally associated, today, to a boring, static or dusty practice. Couldn’t be further from it. As the Tbilisi Architecture Archive project demonstrates well – archiving is a very much lively, dynamic practice. It is not just about storing documents either. Archiving brings people together, creates relations both between people, documents and ideas. Ultimately, it ends up building a completely different picture of the world. In this case, a completely new picture of Tbilisi. A picture that is not just new, but also composite and multifaced.
BEYOND THE ARCHIVE: ACTING FOR CONSERVATION
Tbilisi Architecture Archive is not just about contemplating – it is just as much about acting. “Since 2020 until today”, explains Gegidze, “we have been working on a number of projects together with archiving – for instance we are trying to write biographies of each building, putting together dates, names, information, to really describe its life”. They are also involved in campaigns to save existing buildings from decay or demolition. One of these is Laguna Vere, an iconic aquatic sports complex designed in 1964 by architects Shota Kavlashvili, Ramaz Kiknadze and Guram Abuladze and built in the 1070s. “The Laguna Vere complex”, reads TAA website, “is undergoing continuous and clandestine dismantling, with unique components of its iconic diving tower already vanished, leaving behind a stark concrete mass. While no official demolition permit can be found, it is obvious that the process of dismantling the building has already commenced” warning against the risk of financial speculation. For this specific project, they managed to put together hundreds of pictures and testimonies – in order to give a complete picture of the building’s soul, through both its design and pictures, but also the perspectives of those who lived it.
MY TBILISI, OUR TBILISI. A MULTIGENERATIONAL PERSPECTIVE
“Sometimes”, says Gegidze, who grew up in the 1990s, “it is hard for me to even believe that such a version of Tbilisi even really existed – where are all these buildings so beautiful and full of life as they are sometimes described? I only ever saw them abandoned”. Tchatchkhiani, who grew up in 1960s Tbilisi, smiles tenderly: “oh yes”, she says, “yes, they were beautiful indeed – and such a Tbilisi did exist”. For her, who remembers the splendour of Laguna Vere’s mosaics well, “it is more difficult to believe newer neighbourhoods exist instead”. Those are less, she says, “part of my Tbilisi than Laguna Vere or the older parts of town I grew up in”. In the end, it is all about perspective – all about different stories and images, intertwined and overlapped with each other just like the architectures of Tbilisi. The aim of the Tbilisi Architecture Archive is to put all these perspectives together, to create a complex, stratified image – almost a mirror to the city. The aim is well served. Perhaps, the only truth, as Gegidze and Tchatchkhiani both put it, is that this city – like others, but perhaps more than many others – is “alive, chaotic, wild, honest”.
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