Hybrid Tbilisi. Architecture mirrors multiculturalism

The DAM, Deutsches Architekturmuseum of Frankfurt am Main, celebrates Georgia as a guest of honour of the Frankfurt Book Fair 2018 through an exhibition on Tbilisi’s diverse architecture. The city’s fragmented urban landscape is a direct consequence of its geographical condition: Tbilisi has represented a point at the crossroads of heterogeneous cultures.

The favourable trade location of the Caucasian city, located between the Black and the Caspian seas, and close to the Silk Road, has provoked a succession of encounters, dominations and influences in its history, spanning from Europe, to Turkey, Russia, until the Arab states. As a result, the city is a melting pot of architectural manifestations: orthodox churches coexist with the architecture of the late Soviet regime – such as George Chakhava’s former Ministry for Highway Construction (1974). In Tbilisi, the remnants of the sulphuric baths of Abanotubani, set of the city’s founding myth, meet with European-derived Art Nouveau in its villas.

Multiculturalism – and sometimes cosmopolitism – is structurally embedded in the city’s history. The recent transformations brought a new wave of political engagement and creativity that set Tbilisi as a cultural laboratory standing between Orient and Occident