Konstantin Vasilyevich Babievsky

Konstantin Vasilyevich Babievsky was born in November 1896 in Novozybkov. In April 1927, he graduated from the Architectural Faculty of the Leningrad Institute of Civil Engineers and received an invitation to Tashkent as an architect for the Khlopstroy design office. This is where he stayed. His first major work was the administrative building on Kirov Street, funded jointly by several departments: VSNKh, Glavkhlopkom, Stroybank, and Uzbektorg. It was simply called the -House-Association.- Together with Babievsky, it was designed by A. Petelin and N. Bleze. The two-story building occupied almost an entire block, and the rhythm of large windows, once covered with striped awnings, made it elegant. The main thing about it was hidden: it was the first civilian building in Tashkent made of reinforced concrete. Later, the architects themselves admitted that the two-story house was hardly worth designing in reinforced concrete, -but it was only the first experience.- In the early 1930s, a three-story residential building of -Khlopkom- with brick walls and rounded balconies rose on the corner of Pushkinskaya and Gogol streets. Sources write differently about its apartments. One place says that due to a shortage of plumbing, the house provided one bathroom for two apartments, another says that through -a peculiar grouping of bathrooms of two adjacent apartments- the authors achieved a good economic effect, and a third says that this was the first time apartments had their own kitchens and bathrooms. The house still stands today, on the corner of Mustakillik Avenue and Yahyo Gulyamov Street. In 1934, together with Petelin, he built a museum on Kuybyshev Street, and in 1936, the polyclinic of the Tashkent Textile Combine. On March 23, 1947, a seven-and-a-half-meter-high monument to Pushkin, created according to the designs of sculptor Ivanov and architect Babievsky, was unveiled on Pushkin Square; about five thousand people came to the opening.

From January 1933, Babievsky taught at the architectural faculty of the Central Asian Construction Institute and did not stop doing so for fifty years. Together with Petelin, he was one of the "young architect-assistant professors" of the faculty's first staff, which opened in 1931; in 1943 he defended his dissertation, in 1944 he became an assistant professor, for many years he headed the department of residential building architecture, and from 1971 he served as a professor. Over these years, according to a 1984 calculation, he produced about three thousand architects. In 1972, together with T. Kadyrova and F. Tursunov, he published the book "Architecture of Soviet Uzbekistan". There was also a failure in his biography, which a 1984 anniversary article does not mention. In March 1950, a newspaper analyzed the quality of design in the republic and cited his work as an example: the project for the housing complex of the "Tashtram" trust "was considered three times at the scientific and technical council and approved as 'exemplary for Uzbekistan', but in reality turned out to be of extremely low quality." In the same article, among the best buildings in the republic, the Central Committee house on Gogol Street by his senior department colleague, Georgy Svarichevsky, was named. In 1971, Babievsky received the title of Honored Architect of Uzbekistan, on the same day as Petelin.