Mahalla - Urban Rural Living

The exhibition project MAHALLA presents the architecture of a contemporary vernacular city: the houses in the traditional neighbourhoods of the capital of Uzbekistan, Tashkent.  Such neighbourhoods are called mahallas. For generations, they have shaped the way people live together.

The mahalla is accordingly a fusion of the urban community and its architecture. ‘Mahalla’, the Arabic word for neighbourhood, originally described an informal community forged by familial, professional and ethnic ties.

The basic building block of the mahalla is a courtyard house of a sort found not only in Tashkent, but also in other Uzbek and Central Asian cities. There are numerous variations on this courtyard house, the sum of which gives rise to the homogenous urban structure of these traditional neighbourhoods. Living and working in coexistence with nature are united there, in a finely tuned ecosystem.

The exhibition draws on a variety of media to make the vernacular city visible, with the goal of raising awareness of this cultural heritage among the Uzbek and international publics.  Paradoxically, it is often those typical, everyday things everyone presumes to know inside out that prove to be unknown or rather, subconscious.

As architects we cannot help but feel moved by the mahalla phenomenon: to begin with, the architectural structure is of an indescribable beauty.  Between the blank facades of the introverted residences, the streets are spatial channels, bewilderingly branching out into side arms that often turn out to be dead ends.    

In stark contrast to this stand the interiors of the houses: the entire architectonic energy is focussed on the inner core of a residence, on its courtyard and rooms.

Within the Renaissance-era industrial architecture of the Quarta Tesa, we have recreated a typical Tashkent courtyard house on a 1:1 scale, which is to say, as a life-sized tubular steel silhouette.  This tubular steel architecture is a reduction to the ‘wire frame’ of the house. It is both an approximation of the real house from which it derives and an architectonic endeavour to make the idea of a type physically present and tangibly real.

Complementing the 3D spatial research, Bas Princen used photography to explore the materiality of the spaces and their surfaces. His extreme close-ups render tangible haptic qualities, from traces of the crafts that went into the manufacture of an object, to the  the signs of wear and tear inscribed in it by years of use. This immersive environment conjured by life-sized photographs brings home to the viewer how the steady pulse of time etches itself into existence.

Carlos Casas distilled into sound the noises and silences on the streets and in the houses of the mahalla.  Human voices, animal cries, vehicles, gadgets, machinery, TV and radio were all recorded over lengthy periods, to capture the extremely specific acoustics of the mahallas’ spatiality.

In their sum, these various formats and approaches comprise a thematic and aesthetic whole, a kind of scientific yet at the same time artistic portrait. It is this collective ‘bigger picture’ derived  derived from the complementary research detailed above that makes it possible to have a public discussion about the great relevance of the mahalla phenomenon.