Bank of Georgia headquarters

The administrative building of the Ministry of Road Construction in Tbilisi, Georgia was completed in 1975. It was designed by the architect George Tschachawa and Zurab Dschalagonia. Today it is owned and the headquarters of Bank of Georgia.

Description

The site is located outside the city center on the Kura. It falls very steeply from the west to the east. The building is elevated, the landscape " flowing " freely under it, including a small brook It is widely visible, three arterial roads north lead around it, . Tapping is done from both sides of the property.

The building consists of five horizontal, two-storey building bars. They act as if they had been stacked. Three runs in an East -West direction, perpendicular to the slope and two in north-south direction along the slope. You collar far out over the underlying bars. The building rests on three building cores that stand the horizontal bar from the bottom. They contain the vertical circulation. The highest core has 18 floors. The supporting structure is made of steel and reinforced concrete and founded on solid rock.

The floor area is - after the enlargement of 2011/2012 - 13,500 m. In addition to office space, there is a cafeteria and a gym.

History

At the time of planning Tschachawa was minister for road and thus responsible representative of the client and principal architect in one person. The land he could pick and choose. The contract was awarded directly by the state, without a previous architectural competition, so it was one of the first individual architectural designs in Georgia during the time in the Soviet Union. Involved in the planning, the engineer Temur Tkhilava. The construction costs amounted to six million rubles.

After the collapse of the USSR, the Ministry took off around the turn of the millennium. In 2006 the building of the Bank of Georgia was purchased. Due to the expected high renovation costs and the bad image (rejection of the Socialist past and of modern architecture in general) the bank hesitated to tackle the work to use as headquarters. Therefore, it stood empty until 2010 unused.

In 2007, the building was placed as a national monument under monument protection.

In April 2010, the Bank Board decided - encouraged by current plans of OMA (The Interlace, 2009) and the international attention - the renovations in the summer of 2010 to begin. In July 2010, took place in the building a summer academy under the title Frozen Moments: Architecture Speaks Back. Research & Leisure with artists, academics, architects, curators, business professionals and residents instead of Tbilisi.

The renovations to the headquarters of the Bank were completed in 2011. After an extension to a 11 -meter-high glass cube that serves as the main entrance, 16 departments with 600 employees are now home.

Architects

The lead architect George Tschachawa ( გიორგი ჩახავა ) was born in 1923 in Tbilisi. In 1941, he finished school and then went to the military. He was later awarded for his participation in the Second World War. After the war he studied architecture at the Architecture Department of the State Polytechnic, graduating in 1949. Since then he has worked as an architect and has projects in Georgia, but also in Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Afghanistan realized. By his own account his main inspiration is the landscape of his native Georgia with their traditional mountain villages. The mountainous landscape is an important element in Tschachawas architecture, he says, the more complex the relief is, the more opportunities have the architect. Tschachawa has won numerous awards, from the Georgian Union of Architects, the Architectural Association of the Soviet Union in 1983 with the State Prize of the Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union in 1991 and an honorary member of the International Academy of Architecture of oriental countries. Chakhava died on 25 August 2007.

Architecture

The design is based on a patented pattern in Georgia, the so-called Space City. Idea is to consume by the elevation less floor space, so that the space can be returned under the building nature. According to the architects, the concept is based on the principle of the forest, the building cores correspond to the tree trunks, latches the treetops. Between the base and the canopy there are open, unobstructed open spaces. The application of this principle to the building is to contribute to the psychological well -being and the well-being of users. Tschachawa applied the principle later in other designs on which, however, were not realized.

The idea that the landscape under the building " flows through " and remains relatively untouched, was followed by other architects. Theoretically Le Corbusier dealt with the " house on stilts / piloti " and put this for example in the Unité d' Habitation from 1947 to. In a unique way, the idea of Frank Lloyd Wright 's Fallingwater was realized in 1935. Glenn Murcutt put the saying " easy touch this earth" ( "Touch This Earth Lightly" ) in some of his designs into practice. A contemporary example is the Musée du quai Branly by Jean Nouvel, which is a garden under the building.

The design draws on approaches of the Russian Constructivists of the 1920s. The architect El Lissitzky designed with its Wolkenbügel 1924 a formally similar structure, are broken down in the core of the building and office space into vertical and horizontal components. The Wolkenbügel was developed from a conceptual approach out as an antithesis to skyscrapers.

The building can be assigned to the brutalism due to the use of exposed concrete and clear geometric shapes. However, the concept of Space City shows close links with structuralism. The tension between these movements similar buildings were erected in other countries. Examples are the communication center in Yamanashi Kofu by Kenzo Tange or Habitat 67 by Moshe Safdie, both completed in 1967.

It can also be prepared to have formal links between architecture and usage. Kultermann speaks of a form of construction [ ..]. the content of a stressed solution was most in accordance meaning the formal association to bridges and roads.