Modern Kabul: Legacies of Polish Architects in Afghanistan
In January 1965, the first master plan for the city of Kabul was presented to King Zahir Shah and the city’s administration. Drafted through a collaboration between Afghan architect Esmetullah Enayat Seraj at the municipal planning office and Sergei I. Kolesnikov, the director of Gorstroiproekt (Institute for Town Construction Projects) in Moscow, this plan for the development of the city proposed the adoption of Modernist principles of functional zoning. With the King’s Palace serving as a focal point, the city center was to hold government buildings, places of work, and a central business district (Figure 1).
Figure 1. A view of the Park Hotel in central Kabul, 1971. Courtesy of Arg Archive.
The plan also, writes Elke Beyer, called for introduction of architecture that would advance an imaginary of the Afghan state on a path towards modernization and progress. And in the following decades, the new center was constructed with an emphasis on modern design, heavily utilizing reinforced concrete and guided by the principle that form must follow function. As the architect Ajmal Maiwandi elaborates, this turn was in part fueled by the desire to conceal “traditional architecture, which had a stigma associated with it—that it was backwards and something that people generally didn’t aspire toward.”
One of the buildings constructed in this central zone near the Kabul River was a monumental concrete tower that houses the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology—known locally as Hajhda Manzila (eighteen-story), in a nod to both its specific height and its status as the tallest building in the city (a position it enjoyed until recently) (Figure 2). For my generation, who came of age in Kabul beginning in the early 2000s, Hajhda Manzila, with its monotonous gray concrete facade standing in contrast to the rest of the city, was one of a handful of names and places that stood out when it came to architecture and monumentality.
Figure 2. Ministry of Communication and Information Technology, Kabul, designed by Polish Architect Andrej Riabow,1980s. Photograph by Masoud Akbari.
Despite the building’s importance and distinctiveness, its history is obscure, a fate shared by most of the modern architecture in the city. Intrigued by its dominant, and at times obtrusive, presence, I began to research it.
With few secondary sources on Kabul’s architecture in the second half of the twentieth century, I reached out to the archives of the Ministry of Public Works. Through them I learned that the tower was designed by Polish architect Andrej Dutkiewicz Riabow, working with Polish structural engineer Jerzy Pierzchlewicz.
While Riabow remains a mystery, his work on Hajhda Manzila was not unique. According to Polonika, the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage, Polish architects, including Riabow and, especially, Mieczysław Wrobel, designed many of Kabul’s new buildings between the 1960s and 1980s.
A contemporary of Riabow’s, Wrobel was a graduate of the West Pomeranian University of Technology (formerly Szczecin University of Technology) in Szczecin, Poland, and worked as the general architecture designer and chief of the design office for the state-owned Afghan Construction Unit-Kabul (ACUK) from 1963 to 1967 and 1971 to 1974. There, he designed more than fifteen projects, including buildings for the Ministry of Defense, the Ministry of Interior Affairs, and the Afghan Electric Company, a school for the Ministry of Justice, and a hotel in Jalalabad. He was hailed as “one of the outstanding Polish architects that has ever come to this country” by then-president of ACUK A.H. Kazi.
“Riabow and Wrobel’s designs in Kabul mark an important historical turn, not only in regard to the works of Polish architects in the city, but in situating Kabul’s architecture in longer histories of architectural exchange that took place between the Eastern Bloc and post-colonial states in Asia and Africa, including Afghanistan.”
Riabow and Wrobel’s designs in Kabul mark an important historical turn, not only in regard to the works of Polish architects in the city, but in situating Kabul’s architecture in longer histories of architectural exchange that took place between the Eastern Bloc and post-colonial states in Asia and Africa, including Afghanistan.
In his in-depth analysis of this history, architectural historian Lukasz Stanek claims that this bilateral exchange was sought out, and facilitated, by the two sides on mutually beneficial terms.[1] In Afghanistan’s case, adds Beyer, the “1960s and most of the 1970s was a period of relative stability and multilateral cooperation, with high hopes of modernization.” Polish architects’ presence in Kabul aligns with a historical moment when the central government of Afghanistan set out on an ambitious plan of infrastructure development and urban renewal that employed both local architects like Esmetullah Enayat Seradzh and Abdullah Breshna, along with foreign experts (Figure 3).[2]
Figure 3. Ministry of Education, Kabul, c.1975. Courtesy of Arg Archive.
Having discovered the work of Riabow and Wrobel, I am confident that there is more to learn about the histories of modern architecture in Kabul. Like in the case of Hajhda Manzila, there is a larger story to be told about the city’s urban development that may shed further light on local and global architectural currents. More importantly for Kabul, a city that experienced an extreme level of construction and development over the past two decades, examination of its not-so-distant modern past might provide a valuable lesson for the city’s future.
Editor’s note: This article was submitted for publication before the fall of Kabul and the return to power of the Taliban in Afghanistan in August 2021.
Notes
[1] Lukasz Stanek, Architecture in Global Socialism: Eastern Europe, West Africa, and the Middle East in the Cold War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020), 13.
[2] Stanek, Architecture in Global Socialism, 33.
