«Azerbaijan Architectural Elements»

Azerbaijan’s architecture is an inseparable and important part of the people’ material culture, reflecting their lifestyle and spiritual traditions.  Those of long history and deeply laid foundations, Azerbaijan’s architectural traditions have come trough different stages, formed subject to historical and cultural influences, and reached our days.  Multiple architectural sites and homes throughout Azerbaijan display the people’ cultural values with their original shapes, plan solutions, construction-and-engineering technologies, and rich decorations.

Since the early 20th century, Azerbaijan’s architectural legacy has been attracting researchers’ and architects’ attention; great work has been recently done in the field.  The book presented continues the research traditions and so has collected elements used in Azerbaijan architecture. It should be noted that, while some researches indirectly or partially regard this, there are no papers published on the very topic of traditional elements discovered in Azerbaijan architecture. During those years, researchers collected evidence related to different architectural sites of different epochs; then, they prepared few albums under various titles and primitively published them in a limited number of copies for distribution among professionals only, as a kind of secondary support.  One of the albums, «Architect’s Guidebook», was issued in 1948 by «AzGosProject» (then «AzGosArchProject»), the editor being Mikayil Useynov.  The work, unfortunately, had not been improved for a popular edition.

Having deeply studied those materials, we have decided to present them as a full-pack book.  It should be noted the materials, collected in 1940s and 1950s, had been manuscripts, some of the drawings remaining incomplete. Some other pictures have been exposed to the natural processes of temporal wearing out  or proved totally improper due to mechanical impacts of various sources.  Some other problems have been discovered in terms of systematising.

«Azerbaijan Architectural Elements» presented displays the editorial board’s way, totally different from the earlier formats. As a matter of fact, the previous flaws have been taken into account to be avoided this time; all the stuff has been seriously inspected both in terms of content and graphics.

A selection of the material has been refined and even restored with the computer. It has been divided into sections and briefly categorised.  Not to tire the buying public with the drawings, we have added relevant photos to the book for better information and visual impression.

We believe the book presented will make a good benefit for experts, researchers and all the amateur readers interested in Azerbaijan’s architectural traditions and centuries’ old culture.