The Panoramic Cinema in Tashkent: From Type to Experiment

Abstract

This paper examines the Panoramic Cinema in Tashkent (1964) as a case of typological adaptation at the intersection of technological innovation, spatial experimentation, and seismic engineering. Designed to host panoramic film screenings while supporting stage-congress use, the ensemble is composed of two contrasting volumes—a fully glazed, horizontal foyer and an oval-plan auditorium calibrated to the curvature of panoramic screens, acoustics, clear sightlines, and seismic constraints. Anticipating rapid change in projection systems, the hall was conceived as multi-standard, enabling screenings across formats alongside full professional performance use. Rather than treating the cinema as an isolated object, the study situates its constructional logic within the Soviet architectural habitus—a recurrent foyer–auditorium schema—and reads it comparatively against cognate public buildings across the USSR (cinemas, theatres, sports halls, palaces of culture/arts). The analysis shows how Tashkent reworks the canonical (panoramic-) cinema type into an experimental realisation, retaining a shared morphological language while departing through plan geometry, structural strategy, and programme. More broadly, the paper addresses how architectural value is recognised in non-canonical, geographically peripheral contexts such as Soviet Central Asia, and shows how broad comparative analysis within these contexts helps establish significance beyond the programmatic and visual repetitiveness that dominated modern architectural production in the USSR, demonstrating that, in this case, heritage significance arises from the interplay of media-specific spatial design, seismic adaptation, and typological innovation.