Episode 53: Soviet Housing and its Afterlives in Georgia with Levan Asabashvili

Reimagining Soviet Georgia

On today's episode we welcome architect and researcher Levan Asabashvili to discuss the emergence and development of public housing in the Georgian SSR and what happened to Georgia's housing stock after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

We also explore how Soviet-wide architectural trends in different periods (early Soviet, Stalinist, post-World War 2) manifested in the Georgian SSR and how architecture aligned with ideology, economics and nationhood, with special attention to housing in the Georgian case. We also discuss the role housing played in the emergence of the Soviet middle classes in the late Soviet period and the implications this had for the Soviet Union's collapse.

Throughout the discussion, references are made to images of buildings, all of which can be found here:

https://georgiaphotophiles.wordpress.com/2013/01/26/tbilisi-public-architecture-timeline/

Levan Asabashvili is an architect and researcher based in Tbilisi. He studied architecture at the Tbilisi State Academy of Arts and later at Delft University of Technology. Levan is a co-founder of Urban Reactor, a collective focused on exploring the built environment, and has been involved in establishing the Georgian branch of do.co.mo.mo, an international organization dedicated to documenting and preserving modernist architecture. He also works with Architecture Workshop on design projects and is currently pursuing a PhD at Georgian Technical University, where his research focuses on Soviet architecture and the social, political, and economic factors that have shaped architectural movements.

Read Levan's article "AT THE ROOTS OF POST-SOVIET ARCHITECTURE" here:

https://danarti.org/en/article/at-the-roots-of-post-soviet-architecture---levan-asabashvili/10