The basic premise of the UNESCO World Heritage program is to define a global collection of sites to protect and preserve. At the time of writing, there are 1,223 World Heritage Sites, grouped according to the categories of cultural, natural, and “mixed.” Bukhara, in what is today Uzbekistan, is one of these “cultural” sites. The city is the inheritor of a long intellectual and artisanal tradition, and paying attention to this tradition invites an alternative to the widely accepted UNESCO-led mode of architectural preservation; one that draws on its own history. According to UNESCO, “what makes the concept of World Heritage exceptional is its universal application.”1 But, like any universal system, the program is informed by a specific set of ideas and values—in this case, the idea of keeping built heritage just the way it was at a certain point in time, or returning it to a past state.
John Ruskin’s obsessive, neurotic sketching of the Doge’s Palace and other historic buildings in Venice is a progenitor of this line of thinking.2 Ruskin’s anxiousness to document and preserve was stimulated by a specific perceived threat: the possible destruction of the city’s architecture by occupying troops of the Austrian Empire. The legacy of his far-reaching and widely published impulse can be seen not only in the way Venice today resists the processes of technological change that have led it to be what it is—a museum city for mass consumption—but also in the pervasive mode of selective preservation that applies a standard system to all settings.3 Taken to a global scale, this mode turns away from paying attention to specific, persistent traditions, and instead towards a reliance on crystalized built forms for an idealized snapshot of the past. It is an image that too often bewitches us, as recently exemplified by French president Emmanuel Macron’s leading of a swift consensus to return to Eugène Viollet-le-Duc’s idea of a medieval Notre-Dame de Paris—itself a reductive image of a constantly evolving building—in response to the fire that destroyed some of the oldest parts of the cathedral in 2019.4
There are many alternatives to Ruskin’s anguished preservation and Viollet-le-Duc’s over-eager restoration.5 Preservation as it is conventionally understood is not the only way of observing and experiencing the past in some form, and applying it as a one-size-fits-all approach occludes and even jeopardizes the continuous traditions of a specific place. Practices of renovation have deep roots in many different places, some of which have historically been centers for cultures around the world. The earthen mosques and madrasas of Timbuktu, for instance, have been reinforced, renewed, and rebuilt over the centuries. Bukhara, like Timbuktu, illustrates what a specific kind of renovation anchored in a specific set of traditions could look like. And like Timbuktu—and Paris—Bukhara is a city with a long history as a center of religious, scientific, and literary production that has much to tell us about a cosmopolitan attitude towards an evolving cultural and architectural heritage.
Bukhara is located along the old Silk Routes in Central Asia. The city is dotted with mosques, libraries, markets, madrasas, and caravanserais, which have been continually renewed and restored over thousands of years alongside the continuous operation of the city, albeit at varying scales and degrees of intensity. Bukhara reached its apex during the Samanid Empire in the ninth and tenth centuries, when it became a capital of Persian culture. Its position along major transcontinental trade routes opened it to influences from many different cultures and made it an incubator of art, science, and learning. Merchants, scholars, theologians, and adventurers from kingdoms and territories near and far passed through or settled in Bukhara, contributing to its multifaceted cultural landscape.
Bukhara was home to the polymath Ibn Sina, who is known in the West as Avicenna. Born around 980 CE, Ibn Sina was a clear product of the intellectual culture of Bukhara, where he studied the Quran, Indian mathematics, and major works of Greek medicine and philosophy. He wrote in Arabic and in his native Persian, and his body of work made a significant contribution to what is now referred to as the Islamic Golden Age.6 Ibn Sina left Bukhara at around the age of twenty, at the turn of the eleventh century when the city fell to the Karakhanids, and began a peripatetic life through the Persian courts to the south, ultimately dying in Isfahan in 1037. It is not difficult to imagine that Ibn Sina’s early years in Bukhara, when the city hummed with commercial, spiritual, and intellectual activity, influenced his thinking, particularly his pronouncement that “to whatever object the eye first turns, the same is a wonder and full of wonder, if only we examine it for a little.”7
Bukhara today still rewards a closer look. One of the main activities of the Uzbekistan Art and Culture Development Foundation is “to protect and give new life to Uzbekistan’s tangible and intangible legacy.”8 As part of that effort, it commissioned us to undertake a multi-year project to renew the historic core of Bukhara. This work began with a study of how the city’s historic architecture has been (and is currently) used in order to anticipate its possible future use for residents and visitors. We examined photographs and written records, spoke with inhabitants, and investigated the buildings themselves. We then returned to our office in Dubai to think through our observations, before traveling back to Bukhara, repeating this process over and over again.
As a bustling commercial city that has developed a global culture alongside its uniquely friendly business infrastructure, Dubai today occupies a similar position to that of tenth-century Bukhara. In this sense, the corridor between Dubai and Bukhara that we have traveled along is like the outline of a dialogue across time, one in which the figure of Ibn Sina looms large. Ibn Sina is a firm part of the pantheon of intellectual luminaries, especially in what is conventionally called the Muslim world. He is colloquially known as the father of modern medicine, but he is also much more than that. In Islamic tradition, scientific study is a form of worship, and the pursuit of an empirical understanding of natural phenomena is bound up in wonder at the beauty of divine creation. Furthermore, the role that Muslim societies played in preserving the intellectual lineage of Mediterranean antiquity through the relatively dark ages in Europe was one of revision and addition rather than preservation.9 The manuscripts of Aristotle, Euclid, and Hippocrates that survived in Arabic translation and arrived in Europe in the late Middle Ages were palimpsests with layers of commentary and annotations by scholars like Ibn Sina.
Bukhara’s buildings are themselves palimpsests that make a clear connection between the city’s intellectual and architectural traditions while reflecting the currents of its political history. This part of the Central Asian steppe is a dry landscape with few trees. Native building materials are therefore limited to earth and mud brick. This is something Alexander the Great quickly learned as far back as the fourth century BCE as he built the walls of Alexandria Eschate (“Alexandria-the-Furthest”), near present-day Khujand, Tajikistan.10 Materials and techniques such as timber supports and glazed ceramics arrived as Bukhara flourished along the Silk Routes and were used alongside brick for buildings such as the Samanid Mausoleum, the Karakhanid-era Magoki Attori mosque, the Po-i-Kalyan mosque complex, and the Ark of Bukhara. All of these buildings were constructed over long periods of time, with additions, expansions, and extensions introduced by the different ruling powers that succeeded each other. The result is a city made up of architectural non-icons, recalling Béatrice Grenier’s description of Notre-Dame de Paris as a “chimera” whose plan adapted “as time progressed and as new notions of religious service needed to be brought into the architectural program.”11
Gradually, as Bukhara passed from the Samanids to the Karakhanids, the Western Liao Dynasty, the Mongol Empire and its successor states, the Emirate of Bukhara, the Soviet Union, and now the Republic of Uzbekistan, sea routes for trade and shipping replaced the overland Silk Routes that previously sustained the city. The result was a total collapse of Bukhara’s connectivity, and it moved from global entrepôt to remote, isolated outpost. This led Fitzroy Maclean, during a clandestine visit in the 1930s, to remark on a way of life that seemed to have been untouched by the passage of time.12 What Maclean failed to recognize was the continuous repetition and adaptation of traditions, something that was (and remains) evident in the maintenance of buildings across the city’s landscape. The Ark of Bukhara, for instance, which was probably first erected in the fourth or fifth century BCE, was repeatedly rebuilt and expanded as the city passed from one ruling dynasty to another. The fortress’s massive mud-brick walls contain fragments of ruined sections of its earlier incarnations, a patchwork masonry that exhibits both construction and destruction in perpetual coexistence.13 The repair and renovation of the ark over centuries relied on the communication of architectural techniques among a network of artisans; a system that was also responsible for the continuous renewal of buildings across the city.
Bukhara’s diminishing global relevance did not erode the integrity of the traditions that it had inherited over centuries of cultural interactions. In fact, its isolation solidified the mechanism of transference of building techniques from master craftsman to apprentice, orally and through practice, without written instructions. Methods of working in brick, tile, clay, and decorative terracotta were developed during Bukhara’s flourishing cosmopolitan era and absorbed into the vernacular. Artisanal traditions also evolved and expanded to embrace new technologies and materials, such as plaster in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.
Defining the layers of the urban fabric that reflect its continuous transformation requires an understanding of the immaterial aspects of heritage as much as it does a sensitivity to the condition of the buildings themselves. In contrast to UNESCO’s definition of “intangible cultural heritage” as something that is fragile and important to defend in order to protect “cultural diversity in the face of growing globalization,” it is instead the mechanism of transference rather than the intangible cultural form that has contributed to Bukhara’s enduring operation.14 This remains the prevalent way of working as a builder in the city today. An important lesson from Bukhara’s long history is that globalization is not a threat, but a contributor to tradition.
The historic center of Bukhara is an example of what a constantly evolving project for the city could mean. Following the absorption of the Emirate of Bukhara into the Soviet Union and the destruction of many of its buildings, Bukhara underwent a period of restoration that coincided with a blossoming interest in archaeology. Detailed studies of the Samanid city began in the 1930s with the work of art historian Lazar Israilovich Rempel, among others, and buildings were subsequently restored to a condition considered to be original. From the late 1960s, architects, archaeologists, and historians removed layers of plaster to uncover brickwork and thereby erased many of the architectural layers that had been part of the buildings’ histories.15 In doing so, this coterie of experts reproduced Ruskin’s rhetoric of preservation and Viollet-le-Duc’s of restoration. But this is not the only framework.
Traditional methods of construction in Bukhara involve reusing materials from earlier structures and laying shared foundations. According to local legend, bricks from the fortress of Paykend, located thirty kilometers west of the city, were integrated into the construction of Bukhara in the eleventh century. Close study of individual buildings demonstrates that this as a real practice, and many of the city’s caravanserais consist of new structures built above an older base. The tenth-century necropolis of Chor Bakr features a foundation shared among the various buildings, which are placed on elevated limestone plinths. This produces an even surface on which to build and mitigates potential damage from flooding. The dominant attitude towards architectural heritage in Bukhara has been one not of preservation but of constant renewal and addition. Through this lens, the ancient heart of the city can be seen as an active zone where artisans and artists working today can continue their long conversation with the past.
The historic district consists of a network of buildings—chiefly mosques, madrasas, and caravanserais—that bear traces of continuous construction. The Magoki Attori mosque, for instance, was built by the Karakhanids on the ruins of a Zoroastrian temple, remnants of which are still visible in the interior. The mosque is a rectilinear brick volume with two small domes whose southern façade consists of an arched entryway flanked by decorative carved latticework and simple pilasters. Remnants of colored tiles can be seen in the arch’s frame. In the sixteenth century, another archway was added on the eastern façade to connect the mosque’s upper level with the surrounding neighborhood, providing a second point of access. The building was later converted to a synagogue before becoming a museum of carpets in the Soviet period. Today, Magoki Attori is the oldest building in Bukhara’s historic district and is located four meters below street level, a result of layers of construction that have accumulated around it.
Magoki Attori, 2024. The pit and retaining wall around the building are results of past excavation. Photo: waiwai.
Partial excavation resulting from a project by the Samarkand Archaeological Institute, begun ten years ago and abandoned due to lack of funding, exposed a sixteenth-century hammam and two caravanserais. The floor levels of these older structures suggest that they may have been designed alongside the mosque as a continuous space. With lessons from Chor Bakr, Magoki Attori is currently being renovated to consist of a continuous sequence of plinths, platforms, ramps, and stairs that would connect the building with the street level above. The exterior is being preserved while increasing its connectivity. Towards these ends, a retaining wall that separated the building from its surroundings will be removed. The interiors are being transformed to create a center for visitor information as well as for research on the history of the city, including an elevated space for reading and displays around the periphery.
The courtyard of the Ayazjon Caravanserais, with the Khoja Kalon minaret in the background, ca. 1888–90. Brick caravanserais with upper floors added at a later date can be found across Bukhara. Image courtesy of pastvu.com. Photo: B. P. Mishchenko workshop in Tiflis.
The Olimjon Caravanserai was built during the sixteenth century and includes a sequence of exterior and interior spaces of various sizes for rest and gathering that characterize the Central Asian caravanserai typology. In the years of the Emirate of Bukhara, its upper floor was converted to an art school before becoming a two-story housing complex during the Soviet period. The building has since fallen into disrepair, with water penetration causing serious damage to the brick structure and rotting the timber supports. The ground floor is currently being restored, and the upper level renovated by introducing a lightweight steel structure; a contemporary solution that is the latest in a long sequence of technological interventions over the course of the building’s history.
An internal passage in the Savva Morozov trading house, 1912. The building was later transformed into the Soviet State Bank and has housed the Museum of Fine Arts since 1982. Image courtesy of pastvu.com.
The Museum of Fine Arts—initially built as a bank during the final years of the Emirate of Bukhara in the early twentieth century, and converted into a museum in the late 1970s—is a later addition to central Bukhara. Its sequence of courtyards has the potential to link different parts of the heritage zone together and serve as a community space, while new galleries are introduced on the upper floor.
The renovation of the historic center of Bukhara will be inaugurated with the first edition of the Bukhara Biennial in September 2025. The intention of the biennial is to reinvigorate the city’s culture of openness and intellectual curiosity, and to stimulate the exchange of traditions and techniques from near and far. With the renovated buildings as its setting, its ultimate goal is to bring Bukhara back to something that Ibn Sina would have recognized when he left home as a young man. The project for the renovation of Bukhara is an open one, without an end, which is how buildings have been built in the city throughout its history. This is an attitude towards heritage that is additive and changing, rather than fixed. And while it draws on the architectural and craft traditions of a specific place, it illuminates the global potential of reusing and recombining materials and techniques for dynamic renovation instead of static preservation.
“World Heritage,” UNESCO, accessed April 29, 2025, ➝.
John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, vol. 3, The Fall (London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1851), fig. 5.
Caroline Roux, “Venice Architecture Biennale’s Carlo Ratti: ‘People Talk about Mitigating Climate Change Harm but It’s Too Late,’” Financial Times, April 23, 2025.
Béatrice Grenier, “The Ugly Truth of the Restored Notre-Dame,” Log 63 (Winter/Spring 2025): 31–33.
For Ruskin, restoration was “the most total destruction which a building can suffer” and he insisted that it is “as impossible as to raise the dead, to restore anything that has ever been great or beautiful in architecture.” However, he praised the practice of spoliation in the architecture of the Lombards. See Ruskin’s 1849 essay “The Seven Lamps of Architecture,” (8.242, 8.195), quoted in Ryan Roark, “The Afterlife of Dying Buildings: Ruskin and Preservation in the Twenty-First Century,” in Ruskin’s Ecologies: Figures of Relation from Modern Painters to the Storm-Cloud, eds. Kelly Freeman and Thomas Hughes (London: Courtauld Institute of Art, 2021).
Dimitri Gutas, Avicenna and the Aristotelean Tradition: Introduction to Reading Avicenna’s Philosophical Works (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 13.
Avicenna, De viribus cordis (Venice: per Paganium de Paganinis, 1507), 1.10, fol. 547r, quoted in Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1998), 136 (Emphasis in original).
Gayane Umerova, introduction to Tashkent: A Modernist Capital (New York: Rizzoli, 2024), 8.
Pablo Larios, “Soft Power: On the 2025 Islamic Arts Biennale,” Artforum 63, no. 9 (May 2025).
Robin Lane Fox, Alexander the Great (London: Penguin Books, 2004), 301–303.
Grenier, “The Ugly Truth of the Restored Notre-Dame,” 32.
Fitzroy Maclean, Eastern Approaches (London: Jonathan Cape, 1956).
Ollabergan Allaberganov et al., “The Architectural Legacy of Samarkand and Bukhara along the Silk Road,” Archives for Technical Sciences 32 (2025): 30–31.
“What Is Intangible Cultural Heritage?” UNESCO, accessed May 17, 2025, ➝.
The city of Samarkand today presents a vivid picture of the results of this mode of preservation and restoration, particularly in the three madrasas in the Registan public square.