GRACE revitalizes uzbekistan's modernist icon at venice biennale

soviet modernism: uzbekistan pavilion at venice biennale

At the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale, Uzbekistan turns towards one of the lesser known icons of its modernist heritage: the Sun Institute of Material Science, better known as the Heliocomplex. As the protagonist of the nation’s pavilion, titled A Matter of Radiance and curated by Ekaterina Golovatyuk and Giacomo Cantoni of GRACE, the structure helps to build on the long-term research project Tashkent Modernism XX/XXI. Through this initiative launched in 2021 by ACDF, the architects have worked to document 24 modernist structures across the city. Recognized for preservation, the Heliocomplex stands out for its several spatial and conceptual contradictions — monumental yet fragile, futuristic yet obsolete, scientific yet mythic — while responding best to Carlo Ratti’s curatorial theme for the biennale. The pavilion interrogates this enduring ambiguity: ‘We decided to decline the conventional narrative of preservation and instead intersect it with one of sustainability. The Heliocomplex allowed us to speak about both,’ Golovatyuk tells designboom.

As Golovatyuk and Cantoni note in conversation during our visit to the pavilion, the Heliocomplex’s identity is then not fixed, but is suspended between sustainability and entropy, its scientific roots now revitalized through poetic, social expressions. The pavilion thus presents a dual narrative through fragments of objects from the site, or envisioned for it, that reflects on the Heliocomplex’s role in Uzbekistan’s recent modernist legacy, and another that speculates on its future potential as a hub for sustainable innovation and cultural inquiry.

image by Gerda Studio, courtesy of ACDF

grace studio and acdf reconsider dualities of the heliocomplex

Completed in 1987 and situated in the town of Parkent near Tashkent, the vast structure is one of the last scientific infrastructures built before the collapse of the Soviet Union, designed to harness solar energy at extreme temperatures for scientific experimentation. Today, it stands largely underutilized as one of only two large-scale solar furnaces still in existence globally, although it was operational for just five years. Yet, it remains a powerful symbol of scientific and architectural research that Uzbekistan’s Art and Culture Development Foundation (ACDF) seeks to revitalize. Although the furnace was operational for just five years, it continued to host scientific work in shifting capacities well into the post-Soviet period. Its monumental scale, typical of late Soviet infrastructural ambition, rendered it both functionally redundant and perpetually open to reinvention. The curators take this unresolved quality as a productive tension, proposing that the building’s vast form, while a burden in practical terms, is also what allows it to adapt to new purposes and meanings over time.

To stage this conversation, the Milan-based architects have broken the Heliocomplex down into fragments from scientific relics, and architectural reconstructions to new artistic commissions that each extend the building’s meaning in a different direction. These include solar reflectors, structural components, and a working solar cooker placed at the pavilion’s entrance.‘One example is a table installation by an artist who presents this kind of debris of research, putting together pieces that found application, and others that didn’t,’ Ekaterina Golovatyuk tells us. ‘We also brought in a small heliostat, just one-fifth the size of those in Parkent. This one is a newer-generation prototype, and after the Biennale, it will return to Parkent where it can help upgrade the outdated 1980s-era technology. In that sense, the exhibition is also about enabling the site’s future development.’ While some of these objects have been slightly modified, their recontextualization reveals latent meanings, functions, and imaginaries embedded in the original site. Through a sparse but evocative spatial arrangement, the exhibition also poses an embodied reflection on energy, technology, and the narratives we construct around infrastructure and heritage.

image by Gerda Studio, courtesy of ACDF

interview with grace studio

designboom (DB): Please introduce your journey into this project. How did you come to focus on this particular structure from Tashkent’s modernist heritage, and what drew you to the Heliocomplex as the pavilion’s protagonist?

Giacomo Cantoni (GC): Everything stemmed from a wider research initiative called Tashkent Modernism, about the city’s modernist architectural heritage. This project, supported by ACDF and Gayane Umerova, led us to identify 20 buildings that were later listed as national monuments. Among them, the solar furnace stood out because it aligned most closely with the curatorial statement by Carlo Ratti for this year’s Biennale. And so we decided to focus on this building and explore it in a different way.

Ekaterina Golovatyuk (EG): We decided to decline the conventional narrative of preservation and instead intersect it with one of sustainability. The Heliocomplex allowed us to speak about both. That became, in a way, the central theme of the pavilion, because preservation is not always sustainable, per se, so we were interested in embracing that ambiguity. We wanted to define sustainability in a more subtle, complex way, than just talking about simply harnessing solar energy.

image by Luca Capuano, courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia

DB: How does the curation frame these ambiguities and dualities?

EG: We’re not just leaving it open-ended, but we’re embracing the ambiguity as a value in itself. This isn’t unique to the Heliocomplex — all technology is ambivalent, and all technology is a result of social, political, and economic decisions. It’s never absolute or neutral, so this space opens up conversations around this. We explore this by deconstructing the Heliocomplex into a number of fragments. Some parts speak to its scientific values, while others reflect the more triumphant or less successful moments of its existence.

image by Luca Capuano, courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia

DB: Can you walk us through some of the works in the pavilion that capture these different dimensions of the Heliocomplex — its scientific, symbolic, and architectural layers?

EG: One example is a table installation by an artist who presents this kind of debris of research, putting together pieces that found application, and others that didn’t. We also brought in a small heliostat, just one-fifth the size of those in Parkent. It helps us speak about the humongous scale of the Heliocomplex. This one is a newer-generation prototype, and after the Biennale, it will return to Parkent where it can help upgrade the outdated 1980s-era technology. In that sense, the exhibition is also about enabling the site’s future development. Then there’s the architectural component represented by a one-to-one scale model of the original lab building’s facade, which had been dismantled due to obsolescence. Using original drawings and with support from Italian structural engineers, we reconstructed and optimized it for the pavilion.

image by Gerda Studio, courtesy of ACDF

We also included a chandelier by Lithuanian artist Tirene Lipene, who worked on many modernist buildings in Tashkent. The Heliocomplex itself featured four sculptural works, so this chandelier reflects the tradition of monumental art in Soviet scientific projects. The chandelier is called Parade of Planets, a rare astronomical event when seven planets align. In a way, we see it as a latent declaration of the Soviet Union’s space conquest ambitions. Then we brought in the original model from the late 1970s, which was used to convince government officials to support the construction of the Heliocomplex. And finally, we included a painting by Gurmakin depicting the authors of the original project. It shows the human presence behind it all.

GC: And these benches which we are sitting on, they’re also found on-site in Parkent. It’s interesting because the infrastructure was originally restricted and not open to the public, yet the benches are also typical of public space. Including them was a way to reflect on that shift.

image by Luca Capuano, courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia

DB: Alongside these architectural and scientific elements, did the new commissions contribute to deepening or reframing the narrative around the Heliocomplex?

EG: Each of the three artists we invited tried to give a more poetic, culural reading of the Heliocomplex. Mohideen Rizkiyev worked with scientists to create a 40-centimeter ceramic plate which is the same size as the solar furnace’s focal point. He fired it in a smaller furnace to create a molten glass center, creating an installation for meditation. Azamat Abbasov created a video installation that tries to bind all the pavilion’s different elements into one narrative, and he tries to connect them using the only thing we don’t really see — light.

Many of the original elements are also being reactivated with new meanings in a contemporary context. The Heliocomplex is being reinterpreted from just a scientific monument to a hub for sustainability, which wasn’t part of its original identity. It’s also become an educational infrastructure with a public dimension. We’re trying to communicate that layered complexity in the pavilion.

image by Luca Capuano, courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia

DB: Although you speak of these elements as ‘fragments’, they come together to evoke all these interconnected aspects of the building’s identity. How did you approach the spatial arrangement of the pavilion?

EG: Giacomo and I have long been preoccupied with the theme of preservation, and even in our exhibition design, we care deeply about how context interacts with the work. We never want to erase that or dominate the space. At the Arsenale, we wanted to keep the space very open, letting in natural light, so that the existing architecture would interact with the objects we brought in. That context adds richness and complexity to what’s on display.

DB: In terms of context, then, the historic industrial language of the Arsenale contrasts quite sharply with the modernist expressions of the Heliocomplex. Does that juxtaposition creates new layers of meaning, or does it function more like a scenography?

EG: It’s an interesting parallel that adds another narrative layer. The Arsenale was once a piece of utilitarian infrastructure, and in a way, so was the Heliocomplex, though from a very different era and for a very different purpose. Also, It’s always a challenge to curate an architectural exhibition, especially because of scale. Unlike art, when you’re displaying the object itself, here you’re evoking something that’s absent.

GC: That’s why we brought in original elements or built new ones at a one-to-one scale. We deliberately stretched the installation across the pavilion to evoke the scale and presence of the actual Heliocomplex.

image by Luca Capuano, courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia

DB: You mentioned the heliostat prototype will return to Parkent. Were all the new works and reconstructions conceived with a post-Biennale application in mind?

EG: Yes, we designed the pavilion so that nothing would go to waste. Everything either came from Uzbekistan and will be returned, or was created here to be used there afterward.

The stands that support the commissioned works, for example, are actually mirror-testing tripods used by scientists. We also plan to reinstalled the facade mock-up at the actual site to persuade authorities to restore the original architecture. The heliostat model is fully functional and will be used for future scientific research, and, actually, we also see it as an opportunity to create collaborations between European and Uzbekistan researchers.

Even the bench, the only object that might not return, is made from an organic concrete alternative using rice husk. It can be dismantled and returned to the landscape. And since rice is a key part of Uzbek culture and agriculture, maybe this can stimulate new types of construction typologies that are both sustainable and culturally embedded. The Biennale is a great platform where such connections can take place.

image by Gerda Studio, courtesy of ACDF