Central Microdistricts C-4, C-5 and C-6 (Kashgar, Matonat, Minor)

If you are standing by the Courage Monument, you are standing over the epicenter. The earthquake of April 26, 1966 hit right here, destroying or damaging more than ten square kilometers of the city. Before that day, this was an ordinary Tashkent mahalla: one and two-story adobe houses, courtyards, among them Kashgarka, famous among residents of Tashkent. Today, C-4 is called the Kashgar housing estate, C-5 is the Matonat mahalla, and C-6 is the Minor housing estate. In 1966, there was no talk of preserving the former urban fabric: the appreciation of the historic environment had not yet developed in the USSR, and adobe housing without running water and sewerage did not fit the image of a modern Soviet city. The territory was completely cleared and built, in the words of the designers themselves, - practically on vacant land. Only this vacant land lay not on the outskirts, as usually happened, but in the very center. Hence the task given to the architects: to design the center of Tashkent - in accordance with ideas about the city of the future. The epicenter territory, which went under the letter -C- on the drawings, was divided among the republics. C-1 and C-2 went to Moscow, C-13 to Leningrad, C-7 to Kiev, and C-4, C-5, and C-6 to the Russian Federation: the layout was carried out by Giprogor, and the houses were developed by the Moscow TsNIIEP of Housing. Who exactly built it is best seen from the newspapers of those years. The trust was called Rostashstroy, employing envoys from forty-five regions of the Russian Federation, and in August 1967 its manager Vladimir Markin listed the task as follows: three hundred thirty thousand square meters of housing, five schools for five thousand four hundred students, fourteen daycare centers for three thousand three hundred sixty places, three shopping centers, seventeen shops and canteens, a polyclinic, a pharmacy, and a post office. They worked in shifts and overlapping: as soon as a building reached two floors, plumbers and electricians went inside, and after the fourth, painting work began. In February 1968, in quarter C-4, builders from Novokuznetsk were erecting a nine-story building, finishing work was done by arrivals from Sverdlovsk, a month later in C-5 workers from Krasnodar were at work, and Chelyabinsk workers managed to work in both C-4 and C-5. Next comes the most interesting part. It was necessary to build quickly and cheaply, thousands of people were left without a roof over their heads, and by all rules, a monotonous quarter of one or two series should have turned out. It turned out differently, and contemporaries acknowledged this: the residential area built byalin by the Russian Federation was named one of the most successful in architectural, planning, and compositional solutions, because the authors -used a wide palette of various types of houses-. The palette was as follows. The basis was four-story houses of the 1-310 I/64 series, which TashNIIEP made to replace the obsolete one. The new series featured an isolated passage to the kitchen, larger kitchens and entryways, fewer walkthrough rooms, separate bathrooms, and sun protection for windows and summer spaces. And right there, in the same book, is a sober reservation: summer spaces facing the highway are under the continuous influence of reflected radiation, which makes them practically unsuitable for use. High-rise accents became nine-story buildings of two types. Gallery-type ones, where apartments are accessed from a long common balcony along the entire building, were intended for small and medium-sized families. The experiment was unsuccessful: in summer, open galleries overheated and radiated heat at night, and in autumn and winter, due to their shallow depth, they were flooded with rain, and due to night and day temperature drops, black ice formed on the floor. The second type turned out to be much more successful. A single-section tower with four and five-room apartments is assembled from two blocks, placed mirror-wise and united by an internal courtyard-shaft. Summer verandas open into this courtyard, providing them with through and vertical ventilation without occupying the light front of the living rooms. Ilya Merport called this approach to housing for the south fundamentally new. Direct sunlight did not enter the apartments at all, which in winter turned into a lack of light, but by the standards of the Soviet sixties, a four-story apartment facing two sides, with a veranda and a loggia, was a real luxury. Few such houses were built: only four in C-4. Ground floors were given to the city. In C-5, at the bottom of the four-story buildings were -Books-, -Film and Photo Goods-, a pharmacy, and a bakery, in the nine-story buildings - -Knitwear-, -Haberdashery-, -Children-s Goods-, -Hardware-, a culinary shop, and a canteen for one hundred fifty places, while a chaikhana, a grocery store, and a beauty salon stood separately. In C-4, besides the local fish shop, where people came from other districts, a large -Shoes- store, the Dustlik hotel, a police school, and a fire-technical school operated, and in C-6, the -Kazakhstan- cinema. And lastly, the reason why it is worth stepping into the courtyard here. It was here, for the first time in Tashkent-s practice, that a closed irrigation system with sprinkler installations was used. Climbing plants were widely used in landscaping, and relaxation areas in the yard strips became shaded in the very first years. And on the playgrounds, concrete bowls and channels for sailing toy boats and splashing pools were arranged, moreover, they were placed away from the houses - so that the place most popular with children would not disturb the adults- lives.

Deep inside the quarter, where the four-story buildings part ways, everything is different. Here stand two-story houses, placed tightly against each other in strips, and each apartment has its own enclosed courtyard. They make up less than three percent of the microdistrict's entire housing stock, and this is the most interesting failure of Tashkent modernism. The problem from which they grew was not architectural, but demographic. According to calculations by the housing typology department at TashZNIIEP, by the early seventies, families of seven to twelve people, with at least three preschool-aged children, accounted for about seventeen percent in the cities of Uzbekistan. For such families, a multi-story building is poorly adapted: there are few rooms, an elevator and stairs are beyond a preschooler's strength, and most importantly, children playing in a shared playground cannot be watched over as closely as children in one's own yard. People simply did not want to move into new well-appointed houses, and this was well known. Houses with attached yards were developed by the Moscow TsNIIEP of Housing. The idea is simple: the ground floor rooms open into their own courtyard of thirty to fifty square meters, like in a traditional Uzbek house. Meerport called these courtyards green rooms and emphasized that they are still noticeably larger than summer spaces in other types of houses. He also listed why such a house is good from an urban perspective: it knows how to fold into dense strips no narrower than twenty-five meters, it has no living room windows facing driveways, and therefore the driveways between the strips can be narrowed to six meters. Looking at these houses requires knowing one thing: they only resemble a mahalla in concept. Facades with clear portals, windows under louvered shutters, the rhythm of drainpipes and ventilation grilles - this is the language of postwar modernism, and what is closer here is not old Tashkent, but the villas of Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret in India. This is how Boris Chukhovich reads them, and it is hard to disagree with him when standing nearby. They were well received. Architectural criticism wrote that the inclusion of low-rise buildings in the complex is functionally justified and corresponds to the climate and lifestyle traditions of the population. The hope for continuation was so strong that specialists even appealed to the experience of capitalist countries: they said that in England, dense two-story development with two-level apartments and attached courtyards is arguably the cheapest type of housing. It did not work out. And it fell through not because of ideology, but because of arithmetic. The houses were placed in a staggered order, and microclimatic observations showed that the apartments in the middle of the block lacked normal ventilation, and the courtyard itself, under the continuous action of reflected radiation, became practically uninhabitable. A glowing stone well instead of a green room. But economics delivered the verdict: Meerport formulated it directly in 1976, writing that projects of this type capable of accommodating large families without violating urban planning economics simply do not exist yet. These houses consumed a lot of land while providing few apartments. Therefore, they were built in patches, and he also honestly noted that small arrays of blocked houses lack internal organization and look like mechanical insertions within the four-story development system. The story did not end there. Similar houses with two-level apartments were built in D-20 on Chilanzar, in the North microdistricts, and in Ts-27 in the old city, where they tried to make them not an insertion, but the basis of an entire microdistrict. How this ended is better seen there. And today, this attempt has an unexpected continuation. The German heritage inventory of Tashkent, compiled in the 2010s, names two residential complexes placed in a staggered order on the Ts-5 site among objects that, together with the Pearl building and the Babur Street ensemble, could become the basis for inclusion in the World Heritage List.