For several years Baku has been experiencing an incredible building boom. They build new hotels, office buildings, skyscrapers, modern art museums… which are just stunning! In this article we are going to show you the amazing combination of modern architecture and history.
Driving around Baku, you see building cranes and building lumber all the time. They have three areas to work on. First of all, they reconstruct old Soviet buildings. Secondly, they preserve the ancient part of city by building new buildings in the same architectual style and limiting the entry. And finally, they build multiple modern buildings of unbelievable beauty. On the picture you can see a modern shopping mall and a Hilton hotel. Looks great at night!
The building boom began after the country had won in the Eurovision Song Contest. The pace of construction is really fast because everything should be finished by 2012.
This new building is a carpet museum. It looks like an unrolling carpet. The tower which shows the time is from the Soviet era. It fits great into the modern surroundings.
Look at the building on the left. It looks like a historic building, but in fact it’s new.
The parks are clean and they look just perfect! Fountains, neat lawns, benches, illumination… It’s very pleasant to be there!
Illumination at night.
Flame Towers are the symbol of the city. These are towers of 34, 37, and 37 floors with hotels, offices, and apartments. Total floor area is 350 000 square meters. Construction budget is 350 million dollars.
The towers can be seen from any part of Baku.
The building project.
Zaha Hadid is a famous architect who designed a ‘Heydar Aliyev Center’ with a floor area of 52 000 square meters, a park area of 111 000 square meters, a conference hall, a museum, a library, and a sculpture park.
These are some of her other projects. A pavillion-bridge in Saragoza, Spain.
A ski jump in Innsbruck, Austria.
She designs not only buildings. Here’s her lamp, for example.
‘Heydar Aliyev Center’.
This sign means road construction.
Baku is a city with a special atmosphere. It seems alive, and even this funny statuette seems to have a soul.
Location: Baku
via alexcheban
“The building boom began after the country had won in the Eurovision Song Contest” – they won the contest in May of this year, do you want to tell us that they have built all this in just 4 months???
The reason of the building boom there is actually the export of oil
Wow, Fantastic. You guys will do anything !
Eurovision is just another way of laundering money… i’m just saying…
Highrise and highrise but not firm industrial base.bubble economies does not survive very long ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !
it’s nice when you have oil money
Interesting how they come up with designs for modern architecture. The first design was was created from a braun electric shaver. I know I shave with one every day. Bet that won lots of awards. Nice to see modern architecture come up with new designs. In the past only cubes and rectangles would do. That and tall buildings that looked suspiciously like cigarette lighters and cigarette boxes.
You know you’d think that over the past 60 or so years that the inspiration for modern architecture only included shoe boxes, rectangles, and cubes. Glad to see them moving into taking ideas from electric razors from Germany; way to go!
Isn’t it great how after the last world war the communists and the democrats agreed that only glass and concrete cubes and rectangles should be built! And now they’ve moved to electric shavers! As well as rolled up tubes. Fantastic !
~”Oh Biko, Biko, because Biko”~
oops, disregard that, my bad.
Yes no objection…Beautiful buildings.. looks great…but 40% of population living under poverty
level,overwhelming corruption, authoretarian rule,
Daddy’s personality cult is not so great…And Is there anything in Azerbaijan not named after Heydar Aliyev? Whereever you look president’s daddy’s name is there.BTW liked that dice sculpture, probably dedicated to president’s gambling abilities…