From sacred architecture to a shared creative space, this Tashkent Mosque has been brought back from ruins as a Craft Salon – the newest chapter in Uzbekistan’s cultural revival.
Recent years have marked an exciting chapter for Uzbekistan’s cultural renaissance, as the country – once a Silk Road nexus and later a Soviet industrial hub – rediscovers its heritage through a renewed lens. Spearheaded by the Art and Culture Development Foundation (ACDF), the organisation has introduced several new cultural institutions born from a dedication to preserving heritage architecture and craft to nurture a creative future for the country.
Following neighbouring projects in Tashkent such as the art residencies at the Centre for Contemporary Art and the Naqsh School of Arts, the latest transformation is taking place within Okhun Gazar, an 18th-century mosque in the city’s former blacksmiths’ quarter. “Historically, the site carried the imprint of craft not as an abstract heritage but as an everyday practice of rhythm, heat and touch,” shares ACDF’s chairperson Gayane Umerova, reflecting on the continued resonance of this site’s historic layers within its new function.
The mosque will soon reopen as the Craft Salon: a flexible gathering space, gallery, and atelier that celebrates layers of Uzbekistan’s living craft traditions by convening objects, makers, and visitors through a variety of immersive programmes.
Levantine designer Nada Debs was tasked with revitalising the structure from its near-ruinous state. “It was hard to even read the space,” she says of her first visit. Yet among the debris, she recalls still being able to sense a rhythm. The repetition of over a dozen cupolas still carrying traces of blue, white, gold, and pink, along with the weight of the columns and the play of light across weathered arches, became her cues.
Debs approached the project with respect for the Tashkent mosque’s architectural integrity while responding to its spiritual stillness with both warmth and purity. This sensibility, bringing together Japanese restraint, Levantine warmth, and intricate Central Asian ornamentation, extends her long-standing fascination with East-East exchange.
It is an ideology that finds beauty in simplicity and honesty in materials, revealed across the salon through thoughtful touches. This began with grounding the rich display of handmade crafts in the flooring consisting of locally sourced pink-beige marble that alternates with poured terrazzo in a geometric grid running through the rooms. Curved display tables pick up on the same stone and follow the sweep of the whitewashed cupolas above, while in the main salon, a quieter layering of materials introduces a cross-cultural dialogue. The designer also brings in Lebanese pieces, setting them alongside Uzbek crafts such as Fergana ceramics, Samarkand stone-carving, Bukhara silk embroidery, and printmaking.
“The woodwork was another main anchor,” Debs says, describing how it extends across surfaces and furniture alike to soften the lightness of the pared-back interior. Arched shelving units appear in modular variations – some hand-carved in the traditional Uzbek style, others having a more minimal effect – while latticed panjara screens layer the walls and openings, filtering light and forming subtle thresholds. “On the exterior, they create these beautiful intricate shadows when you enter the mosque,” she adds.
This sense of tactility and transformation carries into how the building is used across its domed galleries to the open-air studios in the garden pavilion. “It’s really meant to be a living salon – for tea ceremonies, for conversation, for making,” Debs shares.
In this shift from sacred to social, the Craft Salon reflects wider efforts to revive Uzbekistan’s storied traditions and reanimate them through contemporary practice and public engagement. “Heritage is strongest when it lives and evolves,” says Umerova. “Protection, for us, is creating environments where traditional techniques can meet new ideas, where young makers and established masters exchange language and practice.” @acdfuz, @studionadadebs
