A Tale of Four Cities

 

Architecture is often the first thing visitors notice, alongside skyline silhouettes, street layouts, and public transport style. These elements form the immediate visual identity of a new city before we explore deeper. Building architecture shapes how we see a new city, acting as a visual language that tells us about its history, culture, and identity. This design style sets the mood and creates our first memories of a place.

This Neo-Romanesque building in Tbilisi, Georgia, exudes remarkable solidity. It conveys quiet authority more than anything else. The high semicircular arches provide a pleasing visual rhythm. The ornamentation is limited to the arches, leaving most of the façade plain, giving the building an authoritative solidity. The entrance appears diminutive in contrast to the scale of the building. The muted palette makes the building almost indistinguishable in the frame.

Tbilisi has always been at the crossroads between Europe, Russia and the Ottoman/Persian worlds. Many of its civic buildings from the late Imperial Russian period adopted a restrained Neo-Romanesque or Neo-Byzantine vocabulary. The broad arches, thick walls and dignified simplicity are very much in that tradition. What makes it distinctive is its lack of ornament. It relies almost entirely on proportion and massing.

This is the Dolmabahce Palace along the Bosphorus in Istanbul. The long façade in classical proportions with minimal projections and with the repetitive windows present a picture of aristocratic aura.

The palace in Neo-Classical style is an architectural manifesto of the late Ottoman empire. The grandeur of this building is derived from length than height. It is best appreciated by sailing along the Bosphorus. The rhythm of identical windows in the façade enhances the splendour of the waterfront location.

This building in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, feels lighter and friendlier. The façade is richly ornamented and is designed for attention and welcoming the visitor. What makes the building so inviting is the warm buff brickwork, so very typical of Central Asia. The overarching vocabulary is one of marketplace and commerce.

The building belongs to the Russian Imperial period, when Samarkand became part of the Russian Empire after 1868. During that era, many commercial buildings combined European eclecticism with local materials.

This is an exuberant building in Beaux-Arts style in Baku, Azerbaijan. Every inch of the façade is embellished - rusticated lower levels, giant pilasters, heavy entablatures, sculptural cartouches, deeply recessed windows, rich mouldings -  layer upon layer of ornament. Every level competes for attention; the eye has little opportunity to rest. The intentional abundance is designed to project prestige and prosperity.

Baku experienced an extraordinary building boom between 1895 and 1915, fuelled by oil wealth. Wealthy industrialists employed architects from Poland, Russia, Italy and elsewhere in Europe. The result is an astonishing concentration of Beaux-Arts, Neo-Baroque and Renaissance Revival buildings.

Four countries. Four histories. Four identities. The four buildings may carry different architectural labels, but they all belong broadly to the long European classical tradition that extends from the Renaissance through the nineteenth century into the early twentieth century. To my untrained architectural eye, they come across as variations in the core tenets of proportion, symmetry and ornamentation.

Seen in isolation, each building tells a local story. Seen together, they reveal a broader narrative of shared artistic traditions stretching from the Bosphorus to the Caucasus and Central Asia. Sometimes the greatest discoveries in travel are not the differences we expect, but the similarities we never anticipated.