Botir Usmonov

Botir (Batyr) Usmonov was born on 13 March 1941 in Tashkent. He served in the Soviet Army in 1960–1963, then worked as a technician at a construction office and as an artist at a club. In 1969 he graduated from the Faculty of Architecture of the Tashkent Polytechnic Institute.

He began his career in design institutes: at Uzgosproekt (1968–1971) as a senior technician and head of a group of architects, and at Tashgenplan (1971–1978) as head of a group and then of a studio. In these years he took part in designing the Uzbekistan sanatorium complex in Sochi with its teahouse, a 12-storey apartment block in Tashkent and the central dispatch building for all kinds of transport; in 1977 he received the Hamza State Prize of the Uzbek SSR.

From 1978 he worked in restoration. He was a workshop head and chief architect of a department at the Uzbek specialised scientific restoration workshop (later the research and design institute for the restoration of cultural monuments), and in 1982–1988 director of the experimental scientific restoration architectural and artistic workshop under the Ministry of Culture. In 1988 he was named Honoured Architect of the Uzbek SSR. His work included the restoration of the Grand Duke Romanov House in Tashkent and the design of his own institute's building.

In 1988–1990 he was deputy head, then head, of the Tashkent main directorate for architecture and urban planning and chief architect of the city. From 1990 to 1994 he was deputy chairman of the State Committee for Architecture, and from 1994 to 2001 head of the Main Scientific and Production Directorate for the Protection of Monuments under the Ministry of Culture. In that post he took part in restoration work in Samarkand, Bukhara, Khiva, Tashkent, Shahrisabz, Karshi and other cities, and represented Uzbekistan at UNESCO when the inclusion of Bukhara in the World Heritage List was discussed.

In the years of independence he worked on the Uzbek embassy in Moscow, the Uzbekistan teahouse in Suhl, Germany, the rebuilding of the Tashkent restaurant in Volgograd, and the monuments to Amir Timur in Tashkent and Shahrisabz. In 1995 he was recognised with the Aga Khan prize for the restoration of Bukhara's historic centre; in 1999 he became a corresponding member of the International Academy of Architecture of the Eastern Countries and received a certificate of high assessment at a mosque builders' symposium in Saudi Arabia. In 1997 he published an album-book marking the 2,500th anniversary of Bukhara and Khiva.

From 2001 until the end of his life Usmonov was first deputy chairman of the Union of Architects of Uzbekistan. He died in Tashkent on 24 September 2017; architects' unions of several countries expressed their condolences.