Rustavi

Rustavi is an unexpected subject for an architectural outing, and an unusually honest one. The city lies thirty kilometres from Tbilisi and is the clearest example of Georgia's industrial history anywhere in the country.

Old Rustavi was a medieval town on the Mtkvari, destroyed by Timur and left as a mound in the ground for centuries. The modern city began in 1948 around the Transcaucasian Metallurgical Plant. It was planned from nothing, and it shows.

Dzveli Rustavi, the old town on the right bank, is a single Stalinist ensemble: a broad boulevard running from the plant to the river, colonnaded facades, loggias, a house of culture, symmetrical squares. This is neoclassicism of the late 1940s and 1950s, built to an ideal of what a Soviet industrial city should look like. On the left bank are panel housing districts of the 1960s to 1980s — a different aesthetic and a different era of the same project.

For anyone travelling by car, Rustavi has two further draws. Rustavi International Motorpark, just outside the city, was completely rebuilt in 2012 and is the main racing circuit of the region; something is usually happening at weekends. And the car market here is the largest second-hand vehicle bazaar in the Caucasus, thousands of cars in ranks, mostly imported from the United States and Europe. Even with nothing to buy, the scale is worth seeing.