Ministry of Highways: A Guide to the Performative Architecture of Tbilisi

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Joanna Warsza Editor

Sternberg Press, Berlin, 2013, English

Nonfiction, Architecture

8.3 x 5.4 inches, paperback, 218 pages, 84 black-and-white and 127 color illustrations

ISBN: 9783943365726

Suggested Retail Price: $22.00

From the Publisher. Once described as “Italy gone Marxist,” Georgia, located in both an advantageous and vulnerable geopolitical position between the Black Sea, Russia, Central Asia, and the Middle East, enjoys a Mediterranean climate and viniculture in combination with a community-oriented and self-determined spirit. Its informal, vernacular, and palimpsestic architecture—reflected in the stunning former Ministry of Highways erected in 1975—reveals the uncanny anticipatory and progressive potential of a place where the past is neither monumentalized nor destroyed, but built upon. Taking the exhibition “Frozen Moments: Architecture Speaks Back” (2010) as its starting point, this guidebook maps the social, urban, and art discourses of the country’s post-Soviet years as seen from its hilly capital of Tbilisi. The publication accompanies the exhibition of the Georgian Pavilion at the 55th International Art Exhibition – la Biennale di Venezia titled “Kamikaze Loggia,” curated by Joanna Warsza.

Once described as “Italy gone Marxist,” Georgia, located on the Black Sea, enjoys a sun-soaked Mediterranean climate in combination with a community-oriented and self-determined spirit. Its recent architectural history—both informal and vernacular but also sanguinely futurist— reveals the uncanny progressive potential of a place where the past is neither monumentalized nor destroyed, but built upon. This palimpsestic legacy—embodied in the stunning Ministry of Highways (1975) government complex in Tbilisi—is explored in this whimsical guidebook to the hilly Georgian capital. With contributions from Ruben Arevshatyan, Didier Faustino, Yona Friedman, Lali Pertenava, Marjetica Potrcˇ, Richard Reynolds, Slavs and Tatars, Jan Verwoert and others.

A Designers & Books Notable Design Book of 2013

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