Tashkent Factory-Kitchen

In the early 1930s, everyday life was meant to be liberated from the kitchen. Cooking was to be done not by every household, but by the city, and factory kitchens were built for this purpose. The Tashkent factory kitchen rose on the site of the former Chicken Bazaar. It worked on two fronts: feeding townspeople in its own dining hall and sending lunches to workers at the city enterprises. According to the description by architectural historian Shukur Askarov, the building was designed for 1,500 people dining simultaneously and for 5,500 lunches a day. It was arranged vertically like a production line: products were stored and prepared in the basement, cooking took place on the ground floor, the dining hall was on the second floor, and a summer dining room operated on the roof in summer. Two wings formed an L-shape and enclosed a courtyard, while a rotunda rose on the corner facing the city. As early as 1983, it was written that the round volume with a projecting second floor successfully organized the intersection of several main thoroughfares. Different sources name either the engineer Chernevsky or the architect S. Chernyavsky as the author; the construction year also varies, from 1933 to 1934. Askarov considered this building unique in its typology and composition not only for Central Asia, but for the entire Soviet Union. It stood for almost eighty years and was demolished in 2012.