In the newest issue of Mark magazine, our entire Perspective section is dedicated to the current architectural boom in Georgia. Here’s a sneak peek inside our investigative coverage, which includes Jürgen Mayer H, UNStudio, Henning Larsen, Studio Fuksas and CMD Ingenieros. Kicking off the extensive report is a feature by Daria Vaisman:
The odd thing about political time and architectural time is that buildings outlive the people who build them. It reverses the normal problem of politics and time, of politicians who think only as far ahead as the ends of their terms. In an address this past New Year’s Eve, Mikheil Saakashvili, Georgia’s president, said that his administration had built more in the last seven years than had been built in the country ‘in the past eight centuries’. Who knows? It is probably true. One thing for certain is that Saakashvili is the first president since Georgia’s independence from the Soviet Union to build anything at all; before he entered office, things were too busy being unbuilt. His predecessors were known for inheriting scrap metal and turning it into smaller pieces of scrap metal. In that sense, at least, recent protests against building projects in Tbilisi’s old town, like the ones organised by a group of artists and historians called ‘Hamqari’, speak to Misha’s capacity to get things done.
Keen to read more about Georgia's new architecture, or other features on Eun Young Yi, Helen & Hard, T. Coraghessan Boyle and Ryue Nishizawa? Click here to order!
