Development of Architecture in Kazakhstan at the Turn of the Millennium

Abstract

The peculiar political and economic situation in the early 1990s in Kazakhstan caused a slight slowdown in the previously rather high rates of mass construction of housing and public buildings. The nomenclature of subjects of design activity, which previously consisted mainly only of large design institutes of various degrees of specialization, was replenished by numerous design and construction firms that have significantly squeezed them out and occupied an impactful market sector, as well as personal creative workshops and individual designers who took on almost any type of object. Mass-scale standard design and construction have practically disappeared.

The most important figurative characteristic of the architecture of Kazakhstan at the turn of the century was a kind of polystyle. The active transformation of the first floors has become one of the characteristic features of the urban environment.

The typology of urban development has been significantly updated.

The practice of memorial and especially multi-denominational religious construction has expanded dramatically, and in most places has become a new mass phenomenon.

The development of a significantly expanded assortment of construction and especially finishing materials and products, as well as solving the problem of their compatibility with widespread ones, has become an important aspect. The resulting massive use of multi-color combinations, including very rich tones, has become a significant feature of the architecture of that time. Reflecting these processes, the Kazakh architecture of the modern period demonstrates broad possibilities of both a one-time complex formation of separate sections of the environment of vital activity "on a turnkey basis", and sequential "implantation" of individual elements into the emerging environmental context.

The acquisition of state independence by Kazakhstan also intensified the processes of architectural self-identification, which had a multi-vector orientation.