Bibliography: #HDDSGWCI

key	HDDSGWCI
title	Храм бахаи в Ашхабаде и архитектурный ориентализм (Khram bakhai v Ashkhabade i arkhitekturnyĭ orientalizm)
author	Muradov, R. G.
item type	Journal article
publication year	2021
date	2021
publication title	Вопросы всеобщей истории архитектуры (Voprosy vseobshcheĭ istorii arkhitektury)
abstract note	In Qajar Iran (1795-1925), Persian architecture, with its almost continuous centuries-old history, experienced the strongest foreign influence, finding itself under the double pressure of Great Britain and Russia. Those trends intensified in the second half of the 19th century and led to a partial modernization of the Iranian economy and culture, which, of course, was reflected in the architecture. While preserving the old images, new building materials and structures started to be used in the composition of buildings, and that ultimately changed both the planning schemes, and volumetric forms, and the nature of the decor. A very expressive and completely unique example of this kind is the world's first Bahá'í temple, built in Ashgabat under the direction of the Russian military engineer V. S. Volkov (1902), who acted rather in the role of the executor of the will of the customer - Abdu'l-Bahá, the spiritual head of the religious community. The adherents of this religion, which arose in Iran in the 19th century on the basis of Shiite Islam, call their temples the Houses of Worship, or Mashrik ul-Azkar (Arabic: 'the place of the rising of the praise of God'). According to the canons of the Bahá'í faith, the House of Worship should have 9 sides, 9 spans, 9 columns, 9 entrances and one dome, symbolizing the unity of all religions, as well as 9 gardens around. All those conditions were reflected in the Ashgabat temple, but, at the first glance, it is almost indistinguishable from a Muslim mosque. Such an ambivalent image of a Bahá'í temple was undoubtedly more conventional in the ethnic environment that developed in Ashgabat in the beginning of the 20th century. Both the forms and the décor of the building seem to be 'Oriental', but in it much more is taken from the arsenal of expressive means of Western Classicism and organically combined with the themes of the Turkic-Persian symbiosis. That is why, according to the author, the Ashgabat Bahá'í temple is not so much a development of an autochthonous tradition as an object of Orientalism. But the idea of this temple, based on the Bahá'í philosophy, does not reflect Western concepts of the 'East' or Asian spatial structures. This is the idea of a future world order uniting the so-called East and West. And, although it is still very conservatively expressed in this object, in its essence it became the forerunner of the international architecture of the 20th century.
pages	217-242
issue	1
volume	16
language	Russian
manual tags	ARCHITECTURE; MASHRIQUL-ADHKAR; ORIENTALISM; ISHQABAD

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