Leon Adamov

Leon Tigranovich Adamov was born on 26 October 1929 in Kokand, into a family of Armenian refugees from Nagorno-Karabakh. In 1954 he graduated from the architecture department of the construction faculty of the Central Asian Polytechnic Institute. As a student he took part in designing a stadium and a covered riding hall in Leningrad and the presidium building of the Academy of Sciences of the Uzbek SSR; his diploma project was the Palace of Cotton Growers in Tashkent.

From 1954 he worked at the Tashkent design institute Sredazgiprovodkhlopok, designing settlements for the builders of large hydro schemes in Central Asia and the institute’s own production buildings. In 1959 he took charge of a new workshop at the Tashgiprogor institute, where the master plan of the Chilanzar district for 250,000 residents and its micro-districts was drawn up. Adamov helped create new series of 4- and 9-storey apartment blocks and in 1961–1963 designed the Palace of Arts.

A Tashgiprogor team under his leadership won first prize in the all-Union competition for the design of Tashkent’s city centre. After the earthquake of 1966 the detailed plan for the centre was revised and approved by the Council of Ministers of the Uzbek SSR in 1968; it became part of the Soviet pavilion exhibit at Expo 70 in Japan and was then built.

In 1970 Adamov and his co-authors received the Hamza State Prize of the Uzbek SSR for a body of work marking the centenary of Lenin’s birth. In 1972 he was awarded a prize of the USSR Council of Ministers for the Tashkent master plan, and in 1975 the USSR State Prize for the architecture of the city centre. He was deputy chief architect of Tashkent in 1970–1986, and in those years also took part in designing the Tashkent Automobile and Road Institute complex and two metro stations.

From 1986, as director of the TashNIiPIgenplan institute, he led work on the city’s new general plan, approved in 1989. In 1990, by then an Honoured Architect of the Uzbek SSR, he set up his own architecture and construction workshop. From 1998 he lived in Seattle, in the United States, and was made an honorary member of the American Society of Landscape Architects for his part in creating the peace parks in Seattle and Tashkent. He died in Seattle on 7 January 2014.