Baku - Oil and Urbanism - Hardcover

Blau, Eve; Rupnik, Ivan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 3038600768 ISBN 13: 9783038600763

Publisher: Park Books, 2019

Synopsis

Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan and formerly part of the Russian Empire and Soviet Union, is the original oil city, with oil and urbanism thoroughly intertwined—economically, politically, and physical—in the city’s fabric. Baku saw its first oil boom in the late nineteenth century, driven by the Russian branch of the Nobel family modernizing the oil fields around Baku as local oil barons poured their new wealth into building a cosmopolitan city center. During the Soviet period, Baku became the site of an urban experiment: the shaping of an oil city of socialist man. That project included Neft Dashlari, a city built on trestles in the Caspian Sea and designed to house thousands of workers, schools, shops, gardens, clinics, and cinemas as well as 2,000 oil rigs, pipelines, and collecting stations. Today, as it heads into an uncertain post-oil future, Baku’s planners and business elites regard the legacy of its past as a resource that sustains new aspirations and identities. Richly illustrated with historical images and archival material, this book tells the story of the city, paying particular attention to how the disparate spatial logics, knowledge bases, and practices of oil production and urban production intersected, affected, and transformed one another creating an urban cultural environment unique among extraction sites. The book also features a new photo essay by celebrated photographer Iwan Baan.
 

About this title

From the Inside Flap

Baku: Oil and Urbanism is the first architectural study of the relationship between oil and urbanism. Its focus is Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan and formerly part of the Russian Empire and Soviet Union. Since the late 19th century, oil and urbanism have been intertwined in the spaces of the city. Later, Baku was the site of one of the most spectacular experiments in Soviet urban and infrastructural design ---Neft Dashlari, - the first off-shore drilling facility in the world, a city built on trestles in the Caspian Sea. Today, Baku is undergoing its second major oil boom. The book examines how urban design, planning, and architecture have dealt with the issue of oil in varying political conditions.

About the Author

Eve Blau is a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. She has previously been curator of exhibitions and publications at the Canadian Centre of Architecture CCA in Montreal. Ivan Rupnik is associate professor at Northeastern University’s College of Arts, Media and Design in Boston.
 

Edition details

• Publisher: Park Books
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 3038600768
• ISBN 13: 9783038600763
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 320