Presidium of the Academy of Sciences (Amu Darya Survey Administration Building)

The three-story building stands strictly symmetrical, and everything in it converges toward the middle. The central volume echoes the monumental portal of a Central Asian mosque or madrasa, a pishtaq, and is crowned with a heavy parapet featuring decorative pointed arches. The wings on the sides are calm, but their windows are also pierced by pointed arches, and in the portal above the entrance there is a narrow balcony with an openwork railing. All of this was built for the Amu Darya Survey Administration. The author of the building, Georgy Mikhailovich Svarichevsky, was a prominent architect of pre-revolutionary Uzbekistan and later the republic's first professor of architecture. He began searching for an "oriental" appearance for a modern building long before the Soviet era: in 1910, when designing the Khiva cinema, he was already introducing forms of medieval Central Asian architecture into the structure. In the building for surveyors, this same technique is carried through to the end: pointed windows, pointed portals, ornamental grilles. In 1923, Svarichevsky himself wrote about something else: "Extremely precise correspondence to each stage becomes a mandatory slogan of construction, and the dimensions of the building are a reflection of production." A few years later, he placed a medieval portal at the center of the facade. The time for such a decision was turbulent. Architectural historian Shukur Askarov writes that it was precisely regarding this building that the national style of those years was linked to pan-Islamism, and calls this accusation absurd. According to his observation, Svarichevsky placed a pishtaq at the center of the facade, but depicted waves in relief in its upper part: this is not a religious building, but an institution that deals with the waters of the Amu Darya. Even the year of construction is given differently by sources. An article from 1983 gives 1928, a magazine caption to a photograph from 1984 gives 1930, and Askarov gives 1932. The building has changed owners at least three times. After the surveyors, it housed the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Uzbekistan; in 1950, it was named among the best buildings of the republic as the "house of the Central Committee of the CP(b)Uz on Gogol Street." The Academy of Sciences of the Uzbek SSR in the 1950s held its presidium meetings at 1 Tukaev Street, then at 15 Kuybyshev Street, and from the mid-1960s its address became 70 Gogol Street. By 1972, Svarichevsky's building was already being called the Presidium of the Academy.