House of Cinema

Here on Uzbekistan Street stood the House of Cinema. It was demolished in December 2017 to clear space for the Tashkent City business center, and with it disappeared one of the most witty structures Tashkent ever had. The thing is, this building wasn't just meant for cinema. It was a film projector. Look at how it is done. In plan, it's a projector schematic: in the corners are the reels, in the center is the lens, and the lens was a large round hall elevated on four powerful concrete supports. The entire facade is broken down into vertical segments in a sixteen-to-nine frame proportion. A wavy metal frieze encircles the round hall, representing a round film can. The sun-protection elements on the facade of the two-story block mimic the sprocket belts used to pull film through the machine. At the rear of the hall is an open superstructure with metal louvers, resembling projector cooling vents. Even the two curved staircases used to exit the hall mimic the pressure plates that hold the film strip. Outside stood three sculptures up to four meters high, resembling unrolled strips of film, the work of sculptor Robert Avakyan, and they had built-in lamps that illuminated the square. In front of the entrance were two ponds with fountains. Inside it was even better. Two staircases led from the foyer upstairs along murals by Bakhodir Jalalov titled "Envoys of Eternity," created from 1982 to 1984. On the eastern side were figures of Uzbek cinema, labeled in Cyrillic: cinematographer Khudoybergan Divanov, actors Azat Ismailov and Razak Khamraev, directors Nabi Ganiev, Kamil Yarmatov, Yakov Protazanov. And opposite, on the western wall, in Latin script: Pablo Picasso, David Siqueiros, Hans Erni, Oswaldo Guayasamin. In the foyer ceiling were five octagonal skylights where crystal chandeliers once hung. When news of the demolition broke, more than seventy architects, directors, and artists signed an appeal to the president not to demolish it, but to integrate the building into the new project. The appeal never reached the recipient; it was stopped at the level of the State Committee for Architecture and Construction. And the last thing worth knowing. German researchers managed to measure and describe this building in November 2017 - a month before the demolition. That is why we can walk through it in detail now, even though we can no longer walk through it at all.