Tbilisi's Cityzen models a growing trend, one reflected in investor economics but also shifting culture, too. OQ's residential project showcase this month explains why smooth, not iconic, is now en vogue.
The Georgian capital Tbilisi features some of the world's most varied architecture, reflecting centuries of empires entering and exiting the Caucasian garrison and perhaps the most varied collection of Soviet styles remaining anywhere (including Moscow). Influences here are myriad.
In more recent times the city's fast-moving contemporary development has spawned a fair amount of projects that are more practical, if not outright forgettable, in the architectural sense. However pockets of inspiration - and perhaps directionality - remain.
Cityzen, one of those, is a tucked into a plateau in the city's west, aptly branded Central Park, with its focal point designed by Zaha Hadid Studio. The project is multifacted and ambitious, if also representative of reimagined Starchitecture that has become ubiquitous across global emerging markets in recent decades.
State of Play: The trend flourished as a showpiece exercise for EM developers and governments, defined by unorthodox lines, bold materials and scale, and often a kind of philosophical opposition to immediate surroundings. Of course, the trend is also defined by the celebrity of the architects (and the marketing value of their attachment to a project) and the ubiquity of their design ideology. Its results are meant to be immediately unmistakable, if not iconic.
But Starchitecture has shown its drawbacks over the decades; specifically the cost and complexity of construction creating long timelines, and inflexibility to the changing conditions and limitations that elapse over those timelines. These elements make Starchitecture both attractive and challenging from an investability perspective.
Cityzen appears, quite intentionally, to resist many of these tropes. Leaning into a kind of harmony with the hills undulating around it, its location obscures rather than showcases. By contrast to the city's past (often Brutalist) Soviet examples, the design aspires to a grounded and human scale, even if its tower will still be one the city's tallest once completed.
OQ View: In making a more restrained statement, Cityzen perhaps makes a statement of its own about a softened Starchitecture, particularly as studios in the category take on more residential mandates to supplement their typically more assertive commercial or public projects.
Some of that is owed to required timelines, investor absorption, and undoing the reputation for complexity. But it might also mark a subtler, more quietly confident era, in the building of physical icons in emerging economies.
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