Sergo Sutyagin

Sergo Mikhailovich Sutyagin was born on 23 February 1937 in Moscow into an engineer’s family. During the war he was evacuated to Uzbekistan: in 1941–1945 he lived with his mother in Samarkand, and from 1946 in Tashkent. In 1954–1960 he studied in the architecture department of the construction faculty at the Central Asian Polytechnic Institute.

After graduating in 1960 he joined the design institute Uzgosproekt (from 1972 the research institute for urban planning, today UzShaharsozlik LITI), where he worked as chief architect of projects and later headed an architectural workshop.

Sutyagin became known in the early 1960s through the Palace of Arts in Tashkent (now the Alisher Navoi Cinema Palace): the design of the wide-screen cinema and concert hall followed a competition won in 1961 by a group of young architects, and the building was completed in 1964. As one of the authors of the project he received the Hamza State Prize of the Uzbek SSR in 1966.

Over the next three decades he took part in designing the Samarkand memorial teahouse (1975) and the “Prospekt Kosmonavtov” metro station (1984, with S. Sokolov) in Tashkent, the “Cranes” monument in Chirchik (1972), a house of services, an administrative and public centre and the Khorezm history museum in Khiva, a cinema and concert hall for 2,300 in Dushanbe (1984), the music and drama theatre (1987) and a literary museum in Kokand, and an indoor swimming pool in Nukus (1990).

In 1991 he became a laureate of the Alisher Navoi State Prize of the Republic of Uzbekistan. He held the title Honoured Architect of Uzbekistan, was a full member of the International Academy of Architecture and received gold diplomas of the Union of Architects of Uzbekistan.

Sergo Sutyagin died in Tashkent on 28 July 2021, aged 84, of complications from COVID-19.