In Uzbekistan, Studio KO Deftly Transforms a Tramway Depot into CCA Tashkent
After a thoughtful renovation, the 1912 structure is reborn as the region's first permanent contemporary art and culture hub
From its ancient roots as a crucial stop on the Silk Road trading network to its post-earthquake rebuild in the late 1960s as a “model Soviet city,” Tashkent has long anchored Central Asia’s cultural and economic life. The Uzbekistan capital’s newly unveiled Centre for Contemporary Arts Tashkent, a flagship initiative of the Uzbekistan Art and Cultural Development Foundation (ACDF), seeks to deepen this identity by establishing the region’s first permanent contemporary art and culture hub.
The building itself imagines a future for the region’s creative community by reimagining its past. ACDF first got the keys to Wilhelm Heinzelmann’s monumental diesel station and tramway depot in 2019; by that time, the 1912 structure was in deep disrepair. “The bricks were in a horrible state,” recalls chairperson Gayane Umerova. “I was looking for a curator who could handle the bricks, who could think of them as something special and spectacular—because they are Nikolai Bricks, the Imperial Russian bricks, and it was important for us to save them.”
While in Marrakech, Umerova discovered the work of Paris-based firm Studio KO, who were in the midst of numerous renovation projects blending contemporary minimalism and local building traditions throughout the old city, including residences and the Bus Palladium hotel. “When I saw their work, I was straightaway like: ‘spot on,”’ she says. When she was next in Paris, she simply walked into their offices. A partnership was set in motion, bearing fruit in Studio KO’s thoughtful transformation of the diesel station into the CCA.
When approaching the entrance, those bricks retain their industrial splendor. The team worked for more than a year, though, shaving their interior flanks to release the diesel fumes that had built up over the years. Once inside, guests descend an elegant sculptural stair made of the same material—a bespoke concrete terrazzo mix created by local artisans—that forms new walls and floors throughout the complex.
A subterranean gallery announces CCA Tashkent’s artistic director and chief curator Sara Raza’s inaugural exhibition, “Hikmah,” named for the Arabic word for wisdom. Ten Uzbek and international artists show newly commissioned or recent work here, including Tashkent-based ceramicist Shokhrukh Rakhimov’s series of orbs given color by local minerals and pigment and Ali Cherri’s reimagining of Jean Cocteau’s cinema as patinated bronze sculpture. “When I was thinking about the exhibition,” Raza says, “it was really important to embed works within the architecture. Studio KO’s design is an astute example of adaptive architecture, so I wanted to maintain that integrity.”
That much is clear as one files through a stainless steel passage between the gallery and the entrance to the main exhibition space, where new flanks of stadium seating rise beneath a hovering steel cube that serves as a new screening area and auditorium. Beyond the cube, the old station returns to view. “The building is almost like a basilica, with a spirituality within its proportion,” muses Studio KO cofounder Olivier Marty. “It was already beautiful, even full of dirt and oil.” Cleaned up, it’s a stunner, lending air and scale to Nadia Kaabi-Linke’s suspended steel reflection on migrant labor Flying Carpets, on loan for the show from the Guggenheim in New York.
Through train-sized doors, the courtyard opens up, defined by Studio KO’s new, swerving stone wall. “We really wanted the contemporary interventions to be legible,” Marty says, “and because the existing [brick] fabric of the building addresses the earthly character of the country, the yellow, we wanted the counterpart to be the mineral nature which, like most of Central Asia, is dark red, dark gray, dark brown stone. And it has a sheen as a counterpart to the matte brick.”
Following this curve, the courtyard offers an intimate area for outdoor sculpture, as well as entrances to a new, purple-carpeted library of books and vinyl, and to a new restaurant. “It will be a real restaurant, not a museum canteen,” Marty says. “We fabricated textiles for the seating in Samarkand, weaving from silk that took almost a year.” Tiles were commissioned from the city’s Rakhimov family ceramic studio. “It’s an area where we really express the holistic approach of our practice, the design of furniture, interiors, and architecture.”
CCA Tashkent currently hosts artist residences in a nearby complex of studios and residences also designed by Studio KO, and will soon expand the program to Samarkand. But its integration of the aesthetic and philosophical, artistic and architectural, historical and potential, really comes to fruition via a new commission in the deep heart of the main exhibition space. Nari Ward’s site-specific Tashkent Grounding reconfigures the building’s bricky, vertical grandeur in a horizontal assemblage of bricks.
“Each is covered with a copper lid, and copper is a material that’s a conductor for electricity. This alludes back to the history of the building, which once powered the city,” Raza says. “When we think about issues to do with imperialism, with how we approach decolonial architecture, we have to show all these layers. In rethinking what the future looks like, arts and architecture play an intrinsic role.” And just as this building once powered the city, it now hopes to power the region’s arrival into the global art markets.