Tashkent: Decolonisation through Architecture
Architectural education unfolds its greatest analytical power where political discourse is most constrained. In Tashkent, the Mosaic Modernism workshop brought together academics from Portugal, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan to re-examine the monumental art of the Soviet era through the lens of decolonisation. In an environment marked by ideological tension, architecture became a language of resistance – continuing DOM’s tradition of linking research, teaching, and cultural critique.
Text: Ana Neiva and Philipp Meuser
Photo: Participants in the workshop in Tashkent. © DOM publishers
Held in Tashkent in October 2025, Mosaic Modernism became a point of genuine intercultural exchange between three architectural traditions that rarely enter into direct dialogue. Students and lecturers from Uzbekistan, Ukraine, and Portugal spent a week probing the political legibility of modernist architecture, combining academic debate with on-site investigation. What emerged was a striking divergence in how the built legacy of the twentieth century is interpreted across cultural contexts.
At the centre of the workshop lay the question of how monumental art and mosaic architecture from the Soviet and post-Soviet periods can be reinterpreted today. In Ukraine, decolonisation has become an existential project: rebuilding is synonymous with cultural self-assertion in the face of Russia’s neo-imperial aggression. Uzbekistan, by contrast, still negotiates its Soviet past through state-curated narratives. Critical engagement with the colonial dimension of Soviet architecture is only beginning to take shape. Against this background, the shift among students of the Tashkent University of Architecture and Construction — who began to view familiar mosaics and façades through a newly politicised lens — was far more than remarkable.
A decisive impulse came from the Portuguese participants. Their research on monumental art in Portugal’s former colonies introduced a postcolonial and postfascist lens into the Central Asian context. Coming from a country marked by the long afterlife of the Estado Novo dictatorship, they articulated with precision how propaganda, power and aesthetics intersect in architectural surfaces. For the Ukrainian group, this perspective resonated deeply: the parallels between Europe’s postfascist heritage and Ukraine’s confrontation with Russia’s neo-fascist and neo-colonial war of aggression were unmistakable. This triangulation – Portuguese postfascist experience, Ukrainian decolonial urgency, and Uzbek ambivalence – turned Mosaic Modernism into an intellectual laboratory.
The Jarsky brothers’ construction technique for Tashkent’s first towering façade mosaic was explained in detail by Rustam Khusanov. Last year, the Uzbek government placed more than 150 façades under special protection. © Ana Neiva
Excursions through Tashkent, guided by independent architects and researchers such as Rustam Khusanov and Alexander Fedorov, led the group into neighbourhoods like Chilonzar, rebuilt after the 1966 earthquake, or Vodnik, an open-air museum of some of the most colorful examples of Soviet façade design. Amid prefabricated housing blocks and the mosaics of Soviet modernism, the participants witnessed how deeply Central Asia’s visual culture remains entangled with political narratives. These mosaics have never been mere ornament: they functioned as ideological media, communicating progress, labour, and collective identity. Today, their reception oscillates between nostalgia, rejection and critical re-reading – a reflection of the broader struggle to position this heritage within evolving national identities.
Central Asia is a region where such debates are only just beginning to take root. Comparable debates unfold more openly in Kazakhstan, especially in Almaty, where questions of cultural emancipation from Russia have become part of public discourse. This was palpable during DOM’s recent launch of Edda Schlager’s Architectural Guide Almaty at the Tselinnyi Tsentr.
In Uzbekistan, such reflection still remains largely confined to academic or artistic circles. Against this backdrop, Mosaic Modernism offered an essential impetus – not to produce final judgments, but to encourage reading the city as a palimpsest of ideology, power and transformation. In this sense, architectural history becomes a political instrument. To analyse façades is to analyse memory, belonging and dependency. The study of modernist monumental art reveals that decolonisation is not achieved through demolition but through understanding: through the capacity to decode how cities narrate power. Tashkent, with its layered history of Soviet planning, Islamic building traditions and contemporary reconstruction initiatives, provides fertile ground for such inquiry.
Mosaic Modernism – Portugal was represented by the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Porto (FAUP), while Ukraine was represented by O.M. Beketov University for Urban Economy (Kharkiv) – stands for a new generation of academic formats that approach architecture not simply as a chronology of styles, but as a medium through which societies negotiate their place in the world. The masterclass demonstrated that international collaboration becomes productive precisely when it disrupts established narratives — not through didactic transfer, but through mutual irritation. In this shared act of questioning the self-evident lies the genuine potential of architectural education today. In 2026, a publication in the Basics series is scheduled to appear, placing the content of these debates in a broader context.’
Strengthening climate resilience in Central Vietnam trough nature-based solutions: Vertical green elements will create a shady and cool public space for school children and residents on hot days. © GCLH
