Interfaces Between Ethnic Discourse and Architectural Theory in Late Soviet Central Asia

You are cordially invited to attend the research seminar by Da Hyung Jeong:

Date: 20 Sept 2024

Time: 2:30 PM – 3:30 PM

Venue: SDE3 Level 4 LT 425

Interfaces Between Ethnic Discourse and Architectural Theory in Late Soviet Central Asia

In late Soviet ethnology, a gap opened up between the orthodoxy upheld by the Institute of Anthropology and the controversial philosopher Lev N. Gumilev’s heterodox views, which suggested that minority groups’ yearning for self-determination could potentially drive historical progress beyond the attainment of socialism.

Within this gap, new discourses emerged that embraced both the orthodox and the heterodox, and the goal of this research seminar is to show how these hybrid discourses fundamentally reshaped Soviet architectural practice. Through close analysis of architectural projects, historical publications and unpublished archives, it argues that non-Russian minority architects in Soviet Central Asia strategically adopted a form of critical regionalism that simultaneously affirmed and negated ethnic difference.

This kind of dialectical approach to spatial design allowed for a critical and environmentally conscious insistence on local specificity, on pre-socialist identities cherished by those increasingly skeptical toward and critical of Soviet imperial rule in the region. Among the buildings to be foregrounded in this seminar are Sabir R. Adylov’s Tashkent Metro, Tashkent, Uzbekistan (1977), Bakhovadin A. Zukhurdinov’s Mirzo Tursunzade Mausoleum in Dushanbe, Tajikistan (1981), Vladimir N. Kim’s Palace of Pioneers in Almaty, Kazakhstan (1983) and Sambyibek B. Nurgaziev’s Kyrgyz SSR State Lenin Library in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan (1984).

Da Hyung Jeong is a Princeton-Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton University’s School of Architecture. He received his PhD in Art History from New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, where his dissertation investigated the rise of architectural postmodernism in the Soviet ‘peripheries.’ His research has been supported by the Getty Research Institute (Los Angeles, USA), where he was a 2021-2022 Predoctoral Fellow, and the Museum of Modern Art (New York, USA).

 At MoMA, he held the Mellon-Marron Museum Research Consortium Fellowship, which enabled him to conduct curatorial research in connection with and contribute to the catalogue of the recent exhibition The Project of Independence: Architecture and Decolonization in South Asia, 1947-1985.