“Xalqlar Do‘stligi” Metro Station (Friendship of Peoples)

The station was named "Druzhby Narodov" (Peoples' Friendship) after the square where it stands, and from there on all its decoration works to serve this name - literally, without allegory. The main highlight here is the track walls. They are faced with light-gray Nurata marble, and copper coats of arms of the fifteen union republics are embedded into the marble at regular intervals. Passengers on the platform look neither at advertisements nor at a blank wall, but at a alternating row of coats of arms. In 1977 this was read as a political statement, but today it is read as a historical document - fifteen states that no longer exist in this composition. The second architectural find is the columns. They were made octagonal in cross-section, from white Nurata marble, and topped with a complex capital in the shape of a lotus bud. A 1977 magazine directly calls this one of the interesting discoveries of the architects. The technique is as old as time - plant capitals are known to both Egypt and the East - but here it is placed in the underground hall of a Soviet metro, and the lotus turns out to be a way to say "this is Central Asia" without resorting to ornamentation. The ceiling is arranged as a separate narrative. The ribbed floor slabs are hemmed with a suspended ceiling of double curvature, on the concave surfaces there is a relief ornament with national patterns, and in the middle of each span there are oval openings where lighting fixtures are hidden. That is, light falls from the ovales, and between them the ceiling curves and holds the pattern, resulting not in a flat plane, but in a softly shimmering surface. The floor is made of gray polished granite slabs with a traditional national pattern. The walls of the vestibules and pedestrian underpasses are faced with the same light-gray marble, so the transition from the street to the platform looks like a single space rather than three different ones. Finally, the art panels are located on the wall and above the descent to the platform. They are made in two techniques at once - colored smalt and copper chasing - and depict, as the magazine writes, the symbolic theme of the friendship of peoples. The authors are artists V. Sosedov and Yu. Zaitsev. The architectural part was designed by the TashNIIPIgeng پلان institute: V. Muratov, U. Rakhimov, M. Galeeva.

Druzhby Narodov was not built on its own, but as part of a transport hub. The underground lobby of the station was placed in the northeastern part of the square, on Novouzbekistanskaya Street, and designed as a single complex with the Communications House: the lobby provides convenient escalator access to the platform hall and is also connected to the adjacent building. The exits are oriented toward the square with its cinema and concert hall. Four years after the station opened, the Palace of Peoples' Friendship will be completed on this square - a huge hall for the sake of which the square was conceived - and the station will turn out to be its underground entrance. The order here is the reverse of the usual: first the metro, then the main building. In 1977, a magazine described the ensemble as an already existing concept, although only the underground part was ready at that time. Tunnels to the station were bored before the halls were finished. In July 1975, Pravda Vostoka reported that the Komsomolskaya - Druzhby Narodov and Druzhby Narodov - Pakhtakor sections had been fully driven, and both using closed-face tunneling, meaning without tearing up the street above. A year later, in June 1976, the newspaper wrote that finishing work at the Druzhby Narodov station was already underway, whereas at the Oktyabrskoy Revolyutsii station only artistic decoration was taking place at that time. The station has another feature visible from the street. Out of more than twenty stations on the first two lines, surface pavilions were built at only three: Chorsu, Pakhtakor, and this one; at all the others, staircases lead directly from the street into the underground lobby. The German-Uzbek inventory of monuments, analyzing the Old City mahalla of Olmazor through which the metro line passed in the late 1970s, names the pavilion of this station among the significant public buildings of the quarter. Structurally, the station is of the column-type - like most stations of the first stage; there are only two vault-type stations on the line, Chilonzor and Hamza. In the magazine table of cross-sections, the Druzhby Narodov hall is shown with a ten-meter-wide platform and a six-meter column spacing - the same scheme as its neighbors, and the entire character of the station is created by its finish rather than its structure.