Brutalism in Georgia

Soviet Georgia enjoyed a reputation for architectural independence, and Tbilisi produced some of the USSR's most daring concrete buildings in the 1970s and 1980s. The emblem is the former Ministry of Highways, now Bank of Georgia (1975), by George Chakhava and Zurab Jalaghania, a stack of interlocking horizontal bars raised above a wooded slope on the space-city logic of leaving the ground free. Equally memorable is the Technical Library (1985), whose sculptural concrete forms show the late Soviet Georgian taste for monumental expression. Many of these works are now protected or under study as Tbilisi reassesses its modernist legacy.