Residential Building of the Chkalov Aircraft Plant

In 1943, on Navoi Street, the foundation was laid for a multi-story apartment building for the Chkalov Aviation Plant, which had arrived in Tashkent during the first winter of the war. The lists of workers who would get the apartments had been compiled by the plant administration long before. The builders poured the foundation, built half of the first floor, and stopped. Then brick, cement, and timber began to be removed from the construction site, a little at a bit at first, and then by truckloads, and the site became empty. In the summer of 1947, bricks began to be brought there again, but work never started. On neighboring construction sites along the same street, complaints were made about the bricks themselves: instead of twenty-five centimeters in length, they arrived at twenty-two, instead of twelve and a half in width at ten, and the builders returned them by truck. The project was designed in 1944 by the city's chief architect, Mithat Bulatov, together with Leonid Karash. In books on Tashkent architecture, the building is dated 1946, but in 1947 construction was still stalled. According to a German guide to the monuments of Tashkent, it was completed in 1948-1950. The building is three stories high and U-shaped in plan. Its apartments are assembled from standard sections, while all the Oriental features are brought out onto the facade. Below are the pointed arches of the shops, in the middle is a passage to the courtyard under an arch reaching the middle of the second floor. On the third floor, six loggias project from the wall like boxes on stout consoles, each opening with a large pointed arch. Below them, flush with the wall, are smaller loggias with a column in the middle and two semicircular arches. The rhythm of these loggias has been compared to the Doge's Palace in Venice.

In 1954, the magazine "Architecture of the USSR" reviewed the new development of Tashkent and disapproved of the very thing for which this building is famous. Pointed arches and loggias became a common theme of Navoi Street, the Anhor embankment, and the new buildings of Bulatov near Besh-Agach, and the critic considered this a mistake: "The pointed arch is by no means a characteristic element of the folk dwelling of Uzbekistan," and its frequent repetition "gives the city the appearance of an impersonally exotic Easternness." He called the loggias on the street facades "unsuccessful from a domestic point of view." The arches of this building, however, had a neighbor. To the west of the construction site stood the Eshonkul Dakhto madrasah, given over to a film studio, and it looked out onto the street with niches under pointed arches. The first floor of the building can be read as their continuation. After the 1966 earthquake, many brick houses of the war and early post-war years had to be strengthened, and their appearance changed. This house lost the cornice above the loggias and the attic decorations. The large loggias of the third floor were glazed and became part of the rooms, the small ones on the second as well, and the columns in them are no longer visible. By 2017, the balconies were sheathed with aluminum panels, and the loggia on columns above the only arch in the eastern wing was closed by a huge screen.