Architectural Speculation
III. Teahouse
This work
was produced with Anisa Sabiri, filmmaker and Alex Grigoras, director of photography, for the short film ‘House of Tarnished Mirrors’, presented at the 79th Locarno Film Festival.
The text below was prepared by A. Sabiri and me for the Conference on Situated Imagination and Imaginaries for Urban Futures, held on17 July 2026 at the Department of Architecture, University of Cambridge.
The soundscape mentioned in the text is by Leo Abrahams.
Our work on the film examines how the moving image might reactivate the memory of a lost urban space. Rather than treating memory as a stable image of the past, the film explores the mechanics of mnemonic perception: how a space may return as an unstable perceptual event. In this sense, the film approaches memory less as representation than as duration and intuitive experience (Bergson, 1998 [1911]). The closest form of experience to this is the dream. For this reason, the film works with the instability of the visible, irrational connections, and the imagined quality of space.
Within this enquiry, the Rohat Teahouse, built in Dushanbe in 1958 and demolished in 2025, became one of the film’s central spatial references. Rohat was significant for Dushanbe both as one of the most prominent public buildings associated with the spatial and cultural atmosphere of Khrushchev’s Thaw, and as a rare attempt to articulate a national public typology within the Soviet framework. During its sixty-seven years of existence, the building was altered several times. The question of which version to reproduce was therefore not only technical, but also methodological. Rather than making a historically exact replica, we chose to identify and work with its underlying structure.
Fig. 1
View of a sphere and columns reflected in the glazed roof surface.
This structure had to be understood on two levels: typological and compositional. Typologically, the Central Asian teahouse was defined less by a fixed form than by a set of spatial conditions: water, shade, the iwan (a canopy), and movement between open and sheltered space. Compositionally, Rohat translated these conditions into a simple and precise modernist structure: a perimeter iwan supported by twenty columns and organised around two fountains. Its proportional logic becomes legible once later additions and decorative elements are set aside. Rohat appears to have been governed by a simple proportional sequence: 1 for the intercolumniation and canopy overhang, 3 for the column height and span, 5 for the depth, and 9 for the width.
At the centre of the teahouse, one was almost in a courtyard. The sky remained visible, while the colonnade formed a boundary between shelter and openness. This was the quality we wanted the model to convey: not the decoration, nor a generalised idea of “local” character, but the spatial intelligence of the building. Yet the very permeability that made Rohat so compelling also made it difficult to translate into a filmable model. Its space had few vertical enclosing planes; it was defined primarily by columns and an iwan. At a scale of 1:30, this openness became harder to register. The first filming tests made this difficulty explicit: the model lacked a focal point, offered too little sense of enclosure, and remained too abstract to be read as an interior with a definite scale. The task was therefore not to add more factual detail, but to make the space perceptible.
Fig. 2
Close view of the model columns, and shadows on the rear wall.
Narratively, the film begins with a boy moving through a generic gallery space. He chases a floating ball, which disappears. Assuming that the ball has hidden inside an object he finds on the floor, he looks inside it and discovers another space. This space contains our interpretation of the Rohat Teahouse.
While working on this space, we aimed to enable a shift between three subjectivities: that of the boy, that of the viewer, and that of the space itself. The space had to cease being a passive object of representation and begin to act as an independent presence. We therefore began to work with the model as a real space, breaking it down into sets of elements through which a sense of interiority could be produced. Rather than reconstructing Rohat as an image of the past, the model produces an estranged encounter with memory, making the familiar spatial type perceptually fluid (Shklovsky, 1916).
Fig. 3
Black Teahouse, photomontage.
As the project developed, we adapted the model in response to the spatial and temporal logic of the moving image. The fountains, reflecting the roof above them, marked the centre and interrupted the apparent infinity of the colonnade. The dusty roof glazing altered the perceived scale and made the model more tactile, while the moving sphere gave the viewer a shifting measure of scale and reappeared in the reflected surfaces above. Several layers of glass produced distorted images in which the roof appeared halfway down the columns, like a trace of the absent upper level of the actual teahouse. These reflective surfaces contained the gaze, returned it into the model, and prevented it from slipping beyond its limits.
Sound also helped us understand what kinds of material traces and objects the model required. Reflecting the fragmentary nature of memory, we used layered, distant, and discontinuous sonic textures. These textures became associated with the fountains, the glazed roof, and the space between them. In the sonic composition ‘Milk Vapour Fogging the Moon’, vapour rises from the dead water of the fountain towards the glass ceiling, where it settles and alters the surface; beyond the glass remain the moon and the trees.
Fig 4.
White Teahouse, photomontage.
We introduced stains on the background wall, a textured ceiling, and moonlight, aiming to convey the atmosphere of a late summer evening. Reflections and shadows created another form of distancing, temporal rather than spatial in nature. The shadow of the miniature on the wall recalled the outline of the original building, while the moving shadows of trees shifted the model into the realm of memory. The miniature ceased to be a literal object and began to be perceived as a mnemonic image. The sphere added a further quality: through its movement and interaction with the space, it introduced a sense of inhabitation, although in a conditional and estranged form.
Fig. 5
Oblique view of the model with layered reflections of columns and roof structure.
Through our model and its filmic image, we try to speak nearby (Trinh, 2011): through fragments, traces, reflections, sounds, and altered spatial sequences. In Nora’s terms, the model becomes a provisional lieu de mémoire: a site where memory gathers precisely because material continuity has been broken. Between memory as duration and memory as site, the moving image becomes a fragile urban imaginary, still available to experience.