A full-scale replica of a house in an Uzbek mahalla aims to highlight a historic and endangered form of community living in the Republic of Uzbekistan's first contribution to the Venice Architecture Biennale.
Called Mahalla: Rural Urban Living and curated by Emanuel Christ and Christoph Gantenbein of Swiss practice Christ & Gantenbein with Victoria Easton, the pavilion grew out of a project led by the team at ETH Zurich researching and documenting mahalla.
Top: the Republic of Uzbekistan's Pavilion was curated by Christoph Gantenbein and Emmanuel Christ. Above: murals are suspended from a yellow structure Broadly describing a particular type of neighbourhood, community or district, mahalla are areas centred on communal or family ties with their own distinctive forms of low-rise, high-density housing, domestic spaces and urban streets, with many regional variations existing across Central Asia and the Arab world.
These neighbourhoods are a vital part of Uzbekistan's cultural heritage, originally built around Islamic rituals before becoming self-governing areas that were then placed under state control by the Soviet Union. Today they are run by government-regulated committees.
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