Oriented on making people closer

Among the oldest residents of Ashgabat there are many veterans who were not only witnesses of the life of the city over the past several decades, but also active participants in the creative work that has been continuously carried out all these years. One of them is a professional town planner, chairman of the Union of Architects and Honored Architect of Turkmenistan, Honorary Elder of the people Ataberdy KURBANLIEV. Especially for the ORIENT website, he shared his memories and answered questions regarding development prospects of the capital.

– In a recent interview with the “Mir” TV channel, the President of Turkmenistan, speaking about the 140th anniversary of Ashgabat celebrated the other day, stressed that “the concept of the city's development provides for a careful attitude to its historical part, carrying out large-scale restoration work, and preserving the unique Ashgabat flavor.” What, in your opinion, is this uniqueness?

– During its 140-year history, Ashgabat has undergone a radical reconstruction several times, accompanied by the development of project documentation. The earliest were still very simple planning schemes, according to which the building of the city began after 1881.

But the street frame in the historic center, created at the end of the 19th century, has survived to this day and has determined the unique character of the urban structure, combining linear and radial types of block planning. Nevertheless, for a whole century, the city actually remained provincial. Only the last 30 years have been marked by an unprecedented rise in construction activity.

Today, special attention is paid to Ashgabat not only as an administrative, economic and cultural center, but also as a city that, in a short historical period, acquired a new international status for itself and became an important factor in the political life of the entire adjacent region. Thanks to the persistent desire of the Leader of the nation to turn Ashgabat into an exemplary modern city with a highly developed infrastructure that is not inferior to world standards, not only local resources were mobilized, but also significant foreign investments were attracted. As a result, we now see an emerging metropolis, which is even included in the Guinness Book of Records as the most white marble city in the world. But this, first of all, speaks of the stylistic unity of modern Ashgabat architecture, subordinate to a single artistic concept.

– You had to survive a natural disaster on October 6, 1948, when a powerful earthquake destroyed Ashgabat, cutting off thousands of lives. Did this tragic event affect you personally and how did you remember it?

I was then only 10 years old, I went to a boarding school. Our hostel was located in the place where the building of the National Conservatory now stands at the corner of Pushkin and Chary Nurymov streets. We were lucky - the roof survived and we, the children, were taken to a safe place. Much later, when I grew up, I was able to assess the scale and consequences of the catastrophe that we experienced. On that fateful night, a minute was enough for most of the buildings of the city and its environs to turn into ruins, all communications were out of order. The darkness of the night through the clouds of rising dust was illuminated by the glow of numerous fires, the streets were filled with the cries and groans of the wounded, the cries and sobs of people distraught with grief. When dawn broke, a terrible sight opened to the eyes of the people: instead of the city there were only trees and stone chimneys of home stoves. There were only a few intact buildings, and most of the surviving ones were in such an emergency condition that they later had to be dismantled.

The earthquake destroyed all the adobe buildings that prevailed in Ashgabat, and severely damaged the main part of the capital buildings made of baked bricks, so they also had to get rid of as the city was cleared of rubble. Throughout the next year, trains with construction materials went to the capital of Turkmenistan. Forest came from Siberia, from the Volga region - cement, from the Urals and Ukraine - metal and various equipment, hundreds of sets of prefabricated frame-panel houses followed from the Baltic states. No warehouses could accommodate the huge volume of incoming cargo. The trains were unloaded along the main railway for 10 kilometers east of the city.

The townspeople had no doubts that Ashgabat should be revived, so the idea to rebuild the capital of Turkmenistan in a new place was quickly rejected. Then there was such enthusiasm around that, in my mind, at first an unaccountable, and then, as I grew older, an increasingly clear desire to build a new city, to become an architect, was ripening. And when it came time to choose a profession, I entered the Moscow Institute of Architecture.

– How did you see the city after graduation, through the eyes of a certified specialist?

– At the end of the 50s, when I started working at the Turkmengosproekt” Institute, temporary dwellings and so-called Finnish houses, urgently erected by the citizens themselves, still prevailed in Ashgabat, but multi-apartment two-storey brick houses with increased earthquake resistance were already built, with stucco decorations on the facades and carved ornaments on the wooden elements of the loggias. Small shops were usually located on the ground floors of corner houses. These houses were built along the perimeter of the old quarters, forming a common courtyard space inside - well green and comfortable. If earlier in Ashgabat the street was the connecting link between the residents of one- and two-apartment houses, now it was replaced by a courtyard. Such compact courtyards actually revived the atmosphere of good-neighborliness, warmth and spiritual kinship of various families, tied by the same destiny, that once existed in the Turkmen community. And from the beginning of the 60s, very interesting public buildings with modernist architecture began to appear, which immediately attracted attention, they wrote a lot about it.

A feature of Ashgabat at that time was the integrated development of the city and its separate districts according to a single plan, subordinate to the general planning idea, which made it possible to create integral urban planning ensembles. The master plan for the reconstruction and restoration of Ashgabat, developed by Leningrad specialists in 1949-1951, preserved and developed the historically established network of city streets.

However, the promising direction of the city's development set by this plan turned out to be in many respects mistaken, therefore, until now, city planners have to solve the problems generated by the myopia of their predecessors. In particular, the city center was essentially neutralized: instead of a compact core (main square), it stretched along the current Makhtumkuli Avenue with the same type of low-rise administrative and residential buildings. And the width of the streets did not correspond to the increasing traffic congestion and did not leave enough space for landscaping, which was so necessary in a hot climate. There were many other reasons that forced the general plan to be corrected twice - in 1958 and 1967.

– Did you also take part in this work?

– Yes, in the mid-60s, on the basis of detailed research, my colleagues and I developed the technical and economic foundations for the development of Ashgabat until 2000, which made it possible to start creating a fundamentally new concept of the general plan. At our suggestion, the city, expanding to the east, was reoriented to the south and southwest - towards the mountains, where the climate is more favorable, and the seismicity is two points lower. The ideas contained in our project were developed in a new master plan, approved in 1974 and completed eight years later. My co-author Viktor Kutumov and I developed it with the assistance of the Lengiprogor Institute, now the Institute of Urban Studies in St. Petersburg. For about twenty years, this master plan was a fundamental document, in accordance with which the strategy for the development of the city structure was determined, new streets were laid, retail facilities, schools, kindergartens, clinics were evenly distributed among the service areas, plots were allocated for construction certain buildings, as well as the network of engineering communications expanded.

The new master plan provided for the correction, as far as possible, of those shortcomings that were contained in the master plans of 1951 and 1958. Almost at the same time, the project of the detailed planning of the center of Ashgabat was being developed. It was more flexible in comparison with the master plan, taking into account the local landscape and indicated in detail the location of specific objects. The pivot around which the main metropolitan square was supposed to be formed, turning into a green esplanade and directed to the south, towards the mountains, finally emerged. These ideas were partially implemented in another era, which came after the proclamation of Turkmenistan's independence.

– How do you assess the achievements of the past thirty years?

– At the time of our youth, even in the most daring forecasts, no one could have imagined such rapid changes, such a leap towards the glory of the capital and the most advanced technologies in construction production. Previously, after all, everything was built extremely slowly, long-term construction became a common phenomenon, and in the 70s the quality of implementation of even the most interesting architectural projects dropped to an unacceptably low level. And over the past 30 years, Ashgabat has not only mastered new functions that it had never had before, but also managed to quickly transform into a qualitatively different city, making a breakthrough to create the most modern infrastructure and radically improving its appearance.

Today, the Turkmen capital is characterized by a wide urban scope, combining elements of global urbanism and local traditions. The requirements for the current reconstruction and expansion of the urban area entailed significant adjustments to the previous master plan. Many of the positions of this document have already been implemented, others are still being implemented, while others have been rejected, since they came into conflict with the requirements of life and do not reflect current realities.

– You have mentioned the master plan many times, but hardly many people imagine what is behind this concept.

– The master plan is a scientifically grounded perspective project for the development of the city, which is one of the main documents of territorial planning. It contains a voluminous analytical block and a project proposal block. Each of them includes a diagram of the objects of electricity, heat, gas and water supply of the city, a diagram of its transport arteries, a diagram showing the zones of the planned location of capital construction objects and much more, without which such a complex artificial organism as a city cannot develop harmoniously.

The territory of Ashgabat is distinguished by rather difficult engineering and geological conditions. High seismicity, the close groundwater, the presence of subsiding soils, and a strong dissection of the relief in the foothills of the Kopetdag create significant restrictions for new buildings. All these factors are taken into account by city planners and also affect the adoption of specific design decisions. It was they who influenced the choice of a new vector for the city's growth in the western direction, along the plain between the spurs of the mountains and the desert.

– But time always makes its own adjustments, doesn't it?

– Of course. And today the task is to rethink many outdated ideas about how a modern metropolitan metropolis should develop. Great attention is paid to logistics: how to easily drive up to a particular residential complex, where to place parking lots, how to ensure traffic safety. In recent years, two and even three-level transport interchanges have been built in and around Ashgabat, which relieved the traffic on city highways and at the same time became a decoration of the city.

The new development strategy for the capital provides for the active inclusion of the ring road into the city's street transport network. It is much safer than other roads, with its help it was possible to separate traffic flows and bring the movement of trucks carrying out transit traffic beyond the perimeter of the city. And the master plan will allow us to look many years ahead and predict what the transport infrastructure of the capital should be, so that the problems inherent in large cities do not arise in the future.

– The President of the country, referring to city planners, always pays great attention to the issues of the ecology of the city, maintaining the purity of the air we breathe...

– This is really true everywhere! And in our climate it is especially important to take into account the "wind rose". This is the name of the diagram that characterizes the wind regime in a given place in meteorology and climatology according to long-term observations. For Ashgabat, even with its original planning at the end of the 19th century, the "wind rose" was correctly defined, therefore, throughout the 20th century, the frame of the street network almost did not change and to this day provides end-to-end ventilation, a favorable microclimate, which is facilitated by abundant landscaping. The fact is that the spurs of the Kopetdag serve as a kind of temperature regulators: thanks to the desert on the one hand, and the mountains on the other, we live in a clean environment - we do not have smog, which, as a rule, pollutes the atmosphere and worsens the ecology of large cities in the world.

– And the last question: what do you mean by "architecture"?

– Architecture is by no means individual buildings and street decorations, but a systematic approach to transforming space. Architecture is an environment that a person creates, on all scales - from interior to natural landscape. This is a complex process, it is a chain of decisions and actions of many people. When all the links of this chain - from the concept to its implementation - are coordinated, subordinated to a common strategy, we can expect a qualitative improvement of the entire urban structure in the foreseeable future.

ORIENT