Tashkent hopes to draw tourists to its modernist buildings

TASHKENT -- The tearing down of the iconic movie theater Dom Kino to make way for a business park in 2017 alarmed those who loved Tashkent's modernist architecture, a collection of Soviet-era civic buildings.

They needn't have worried. Six years later, Tashkent's architecture is being recast as a tourist draw. An app that helps tourists navigate a route around the key buildings was recently launched by Uzbekistan's Art and Culture Development Foundation together with a group of international architects and academics under the Tashkent Modernism XX/XXI project.