Tbilisi Soviet-era Building Listed Among the Best Brutalist Architecture Examples

TBILISI – An eccentric Soviet style building located on the outskirts of Georgia’s capital Tbilisi has been listed as one of the top 10 examples of Brutalist architecture in the world.

The building, which is now the Bank of Georgia’s headquarters, was the former Ministry of Highway Construction for Soviet Georgia. Built in 1975 by Giorgi Chakhava who, as deputy minister of the Georgia Ministry of Road Construction, was both a client and the building’s architect.

Although influenced by the Soviet Union’s Constructivist architecture of the 1920s, Chakhava says that the building’s monumental interlocking structural grid is rooted in nature. 

His aim was to occupy as little ground space as possible with the various floors of the building opening out like branches from the central root of a tree.

The New York Times named it as a “Surprising Discovery for Westerners”, moreover the building was listed by many international publications as one of the most vivid and marvelous buildings of late Soviet architecture.