Georgy Mikhailovich Svarichevsky

Georgy Mikhailovich Svarichevsky built in Tashkent under both the Governor-Generals and the Soviets, and by the end of his life he managed to become the first professor of architecture in the republic. In 1910, according to his design on Samarkandskaya Street, single-story houses with wooden architraves were built in the so-called "Russian style"; in one of them, house No. 24, Vera Komissarzhevskaya lived. The street stood almost unchanged until the 1966 earthquake, and then Lenin Boulevard ran in its place. In the same year of 1910, he designed the "Khiva" cinema and even then introduced forms of Central Asian medieval architecture into the building. In 1912, the building of the Judicial Establishments appeared, which he built together with K. M. Tiltin. Seventy-five years later it was found in the courtyard of the Railway Administration, "hidden", and marked on the plan in red as an object of the highest value, and its main facade was said to be no worse than that of Pashkov House in Moscow. After the revolution, he became one of those who drew the new city. In 1924, together with G. P. Bauer, he drew up the "Plan for the Regulation of Part of the New City of Tashkent", the first planning project of the Soviet era: in the center of the new public district, at the intersection of Gogol and Proletarskaya streets, a circular square with a high obelisk was supposed to lie. A year later, in the improvement department under his leadership and the leadership of L. N. Voronin, the first general plan of the city was drawn up. The plan did not assume major changes in the center, but instead divided new lands into blocks; thus, the former Tezikov dacha went to the cooperative construction of railway workers. He also built himself. A two-story residential building on the corner of Pushkin and Zhukovsky, a house for Tashtram workers on Proletarskaya, which already had sections with two apartments on the landing and through ventilation. The Workers' University on Proletarskaya, 1929, was built on a voluntary basis, with the participation of plants and factories. The building of the Amudarya Exploration Administration with a portal in the middle of the facade was later occupied by the Central Committee of the Communist Party, and in 1950 it was named among the best buildings in the republic; later it became the presidium of the Academy of Sciences. In 1934, the expert commission headed by him chose the project of the Academic Theater on the site of the Voskresensky Bazaar. The commission gave preference to the more economical project of A. I. Petelin, and found Shchusev's project to be almost twice as large in volume and with poor acoustics. The jury disagreed with the experts, and the theater was built according to Shchusev. Svarichevsky died in 1936. He is buried in Botkin Cemetery, in the common fence of the Kerenskys and Svarichevskys: his wife Nadezhda Fedorovna, the eldest sister of Alexander Kerensky, died in 1911 at the age of thirty-five.

In Svarichevsky's architecture, there is one form to which he returned for fifteen years, both before the revolution and after it: the sphere. It first appears in his 1915 design for the seven-story Trade and Industry Museum for Tashkent. In 1920, he designed a seven-story Museum of Arts, again featuring a sphere. In 1925, he reduced the same technique to a single floor in the 'Skorostroy' standard residential building. And in 1930-1931, he proposed standard workers' dwellings that were named accordingly: 'Hemisphere'. By that time, the form had acquired a new rationale, an economic one. A round house has fewer exterior walls for the same floor area, and it could be built without wood. A museum-scale concept turned into an argument for economy in workers' housing. Architectural historian Shukur Askarov, writing about him in the 1970s, placed these explorations alongside the projects for spherical houses that Buckminster Fuller began working on in the 1920s. Svarichevsky himself wrote as early as 1923: 'The utmost precise correspondence to each stage becomes a mandatory slogan of construction, and the building's envelope is a reflection of production'.