Lazika Municipality by Architects of Invention

An edifice projected to serve as a public service’s headquarters in a city not yet existing. This is the case of the Municipality building in Lazika, Georgia, entirely developed by the London and Tbilisi firm Architects of Invention. The project was born only after the 2011 decision of the Georgian president to embrace the Chinese principles of instantaneous urban planning and erect Lazika city in what is now a desolate, swampy land. The advancement of the building was almost instantaneous itself, being completed after only 168 days the past September.

The office complex is an elaborate steel structure consisting of separate volumes, each functionally separated from the others. The metal and glass blocks are spaced from one another through narrow columns, which traditionally rise from the ground level the houses located in the same damp-soil area. The result, from a visual point of view, is something similar to “floating objects”, also a clever attempt at raising the client’s awareness of the risks associated to see level rises caused by an anticipated global warming. Somewhere in between an edifice and a sculpture, the whole project was considered as a void that had to be filled up with alternate masses, creating what is now an original mixture of empty and full spaces.

The complexity of the building’s design mandated for the exclusive use of steel applying the Structural Steel Framing Solution technique to complete it, although the original idea was to keep costs down by employing local contraction methods and materials. The structure can hold about 40 employees, divided into a ground-floor staff for the Public Services Hall and two plinth offices for the Municipality. The elevated-surfaces construction was purposefully thought to interact with the predominantly flat geography of the area, allowing to overlook all around the city of Lazika, which will soon sprout to life.