to the west. Today it is the site of Turkmenistan’s largest oil refinery and
perhaps more importantly the $1 billion Awaza tourism development project
that envisions a seaside resort city of hotels, spas and restaurants in a free
economic zone with reduced visa restrictions for tourists.
In the context of policy to open up Turkmenistan to international tourism,
the design team of the Congress Hall started out with the objective to inject
vitality, creativity and the spirit of innovation to public and cultural space
in the proposed economic zone in Turkmenbaşy. To achieve this goal,
the design focused on creating an architecture driven by computational
design merged with an understanding of the local cultural heritage.
The design of the Congress Hall and Convention Center consists of five
independent buildings and a central hall underneath a common pergola.
The interior spaces of the buildings are public programs developing
areas differentiated by functions and users, including conference rooms,
meeting halls, exhibitions areas, and auditorium for 1800 people and
administrative offices. RTA – Office declared that before deciding on major
design considerations, they intensively studied the vernacular architectural
language of the region. The information gleaned from this analytic process
was filtered through computational design to generate ideas for the plan
and structure of the building.
Specifically the medieval architecture ruins of the ancient city of Merv were
used as the starting point for the angled geometries of the Congress Hall.
These ruins that have sloping volumes that narrow from bottom to top
were the basis for the architectural solution using computational design to
take these simple shapes and expand them into a flexible system for the
whole project. As a result, from the basic sloping form a complex geometry
was established that has a number of different vectored orientations and
extended sharp lines to take advantage of views and light, establishing
the building’s low slung iconic shape on the landscape.
MAYIS - HAZİRAN 2013 / MAY - JUNE 2013 • NATURA 41