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Against the prevailing urban narrative of Soviet architectural modernities, this project looks to interpret the architectural and territorial histories of collective and state farms across Georgia. Like crystalline carapaces of Soviet spatial planning, these totalizing projects explicitly link regional, infrastructural, landscape, urban, architectural, and institutional registers through a well-defined set of typologies and agricultural formats. But far from purely historical in significance, these spatial artifacts are today being re-inhabited by a range of new state and extra-state actors: from Internally Displaced Persons from the civil war of the 1990's, to a new entrepreneurial class who capitalized on the vast privatization of land in the late 90's, to the more recent first wave of climate refugees resettled in these anticipatory village forms. These settlements, then, serve as both retroactive sites of research as well as anticipatory forms of a contested rural future.

The Soviet state farm system marks the crystallization of social and spatial aspirations of the USSR—bringing together architecture, landscape, village planning, infrastructure, and territorial arrangements. They were part of a much wider technology of statecraft that James C. Scott describes as the project of legibility—where people and things enter into the focal frame of the state. State farms were, in many ways, one of the purest articulations of both central economic planning and centralized land-use practices in the vast Soviet diagram—a territorial apparatus that linked extraction, production and processing with the infrastructures of everyday life. Housing, schools, social clubs, and health infrastructures were brought together with often singular commodity regimes in a way that merged the logistics of factory production with daily social reproduction.

Administratively, Soviet farms were split into two general categories—collective farms (GEO: kolmeurneoba; RU: kolhoz) and state farms (GEO: meurneoba; RU: sovkhoz). The signal socio/spatial distinction in each was the degree of prior settlement and centralized organization present in each case. Collective farms were generally new assemblies of already-existing villages or settlements into a new productive unit—with a higher degree of autonomy in governance and production. State farms were generally newly designed villages, ex nihilio, on sites where no significant prior settlement existed, and subjected completely to central production mandates. Collective farms operated along more heterogenous production practices in a kind of material buy-back scheme with the state, while workers on state farms generally produced single commodities and were state employees themselves.

Constructed Order

From a design perspective, the meurneoba was a synthetic exercise, merging the dictates of modernist town planning with the village vernaculars of surrounding regions. Modernist principles neatly distributed functions in geometrically clear settlement patterns—where axiality, gridded paths, and visible hierarchies clearly distinguished these village forms from their vernacular neighbors. Variations on single, duplex quad, and multi-family housing brought new forms of dwelling to the village, in sharp distinction to the single household pattern that was ubiquitous in the pre-Soviet village. Which along with new building types—factories, hotels, shops, schools, and administrative centers—signalled a general urbanization of the countryside. The result is a hybrid aesthetic, impure and composite in its articulation.

Socially, the soviet farms mark a much more complicated protocol. In many instances families were forced into new forms of collective production or relocated wholesale from surrounding villages. And while the architectural language of housing was often mobilized to reference regional vernaculars, the lifeways they coerced were not as easily mimicked. With this often-forced resettlement, then, it is no surprise that many of the state farms were abandoned after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when freedom of movement and choice were reestablished. Into these carapace of Soviet collectivity newly displaced populations from the inter-ethnic wars following soviet withdrawal found temporary housing—a situation that remains unresolved and stagnant to today.

Altered Terrain

Visiting these sites today, one is left wondering how the rural landscape of collectivization could have ever been imagined—but also how it may provide fragmentary insight into a possible future. The troubled history and episodic transition of the state farm system stands as a material critique of both an efficiency model of the countryside as well as the totalizing state forms that gave rise to it. The scale and concentration of rural production left little room for gradual transformation and instead led to the wholesale emptying of these rural centers. Coupled with uneven land ownership models and interruptions to distribution/supply chains, these former sites of production have been all but shuttered.

Yet within this infrastructural shell are the very elements that potentially rework our image of the countryside. Medium density housing, social infrastructures, homestead models, and production facilities are all signature elements of the meurnoeba typology. And a deeper reading of this specific history may provide certain models for new ways of living together within these landscapes—albeit in more equitable and just ways than were found in their initial inception.

Open Grounds

In this project, our collaborative research team based at Free University of Tbilisi has begun to read the cultural landscape of the designed countryside from both an architectural/typological as well as a social/political register. Through archival research, fieldwork, social and architectural documentation, and interpretive projects, we look to tell a comprehensive history of these complicated sites.