IMELI Building, Tbilisi
Shchusev’s colonnade on Rustaveli Avenue – built for the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute by the architect of Lenin’s mausoleum, contested ever since.
At a glance
- Type
- Former party institute
- Period
- 1933-1938
- Style
- Stalinist Modernism / Stripped Classicism
- Location
- Rustaveli Avenue, Tbilisi, Georgia
- Coordinates
- 41.6977, 44.7972
- Architect
- Alexey Shchusev
Overview
The IMELI building – the Georgian branch of the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute – is the most architecturally distinguished Soviet building on Tbilisi’s grand Rustaveli Avenue. Alexey Shchusev, designer of Lenin’s mausoleum and the Moskva Hotel, gave it a long colonnade of square fluted piers in grey-gold Bolnisi tuff, fusing Soviet monumentality with Georgian stone-carving traditions in relief friezes by Tamara Abakelia.
History
Completed in 1938 to house the party archive and the canon of Marxism-Leninism in Georgia – Stalin’s homeland, where the cult demanded special magnificence – the building later served as a parliament annex. After independence it stood at the center of restitution battles and a controversial luxury-hotel conversion, halted and disputed, that made IMELI the test case of how post-Soviet Georgia treats its Soviet architectural inheritance.
Architecture and Design
Shchusev’s composition is a temple front without a pediment: eleven bays of piers carrying a deep entablature, the stone carved with Georgian vine and pomegranate motifs. Abakelia’s reliefs of labor and struggle flank the entrance. The interiors held a marble ceremonial stair and the ar archive vaults of the party.
Cultural significance
IMELI is the masterpiece of Stalinist architecture in the Caucasus and a mirror of Georgia’s unresolved relationship with that past – too fine to demolish, too charged to inhabit easily. Architectural historians rank its stonework among Shchusev’s best; preservationists made it the emblem of their cause in Tbilisi.
Visiting today
The exterior colonnade and reliefs can be viewed from Rustaveli Avenue at all times; interior access depends on the stalled redevelopment. The Parliament, Opera, and National Museum line the same celebrated avenue.
Getting there
Rustaveli metro station is 300 metres away; the building stands midway along the avenue between Freedom Square and Rustaveli’s theatre district.
Sources and resources
Find it on the map
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