by Alla Vronskaya, last edited on 17.05.2022

Azerbaijan is located in Transcaucasia, on the Caspian sea: the capital, Baku, is situated on the Absheron peninsula, while the rest of the country spreads into the mainland. Populated by Turkic-speaking and Islamic Shia population, Azerbaijan was a part of Iran until the early nineteenth century, when it was ceded to the Russian empire. With a relatively small population (Azerbaijan had approximately two million residents in the 1920s and approximately seven million by the end of the Soviet rule), it has had only one major center of economy, culture, and education–Baku–where all main institutes of architecture and design were also located.

The Caspian sea shelf is rich in oil, which was discovered as early as the early nineteenth century, by the century’s end becoming one of the first industrialized oil extraction sites. By the beginning of the Second World War, Baku would provide 80% of fuel supplies in the Soviet Union. Since the 1870s, international oil companies such as the Nobel Brothers Petroleum Production company had a significant presence in Baku. The booming oil industry enabled the emergence of a prosperous upper class, which invested into lavish architecture in the city. Baku Technical College was founded in 1887, offering a specialization in construction (however, it was not considered an institute of higher education and its graduates were not able to independently practice architecture). 

At the turn of the twentieth century, oil extraction required a significant labor force, and consequently Baku became one of the hotspots of the revolutionary movement and home to some of the earliest political parties in the Russian empire. The most prominent of these parties, Musavat, was founded in 1911 and was violently suppressed by the Soviet power in 1923. The old political elites were subjected to further political repression during the 1930s, when the father of architect Shafiga Zeynalova, once an ardent Musavat-supporter, was incarcerated (later dying in prison) while the father of Rena Efendizade, once an officer in the Tsarist army, had to hide his background. 

Following the Soviet revolution, a short-lived Transcaucasian Democratic Federative Republic was announced in 1918, which split into Georgian, Armenian, and Azerbaijan republics the same year. In 1920, the Red Army entered Baku, which led to the foundation of Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic. In 1922, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Armenia joined the Soviet Union as one Transcaucasian Soviet Socialist Republic, which existed until 1936, when the three republics became separate within the Soviet Union. In the 1920s and 1930s, as a major industrial center, Baku became the location of new, experimental settlements, some of which were built by such luminaries of constructivism as the Vesnin brothers and by other major Soviet architects and planners: Alexey Shchusev, Vladimir Semenov, Lev Rudnev, and others.

In 1920, Baku Technical College was reorganized as a higher educational institution, Baku Polytechnic Institute. In 1934, it became known as Azerbaijan Industrial Institute, which offered education in construction engineering. In 1952, it was again reorganized as Azerbaijan Polytechnic Institute with a department of construction within it; the department of engineering was opened in 1968. 

After the Soviet revolution, unlike elsewhere in the Soviet Union, in Transcaucasia, many former upper class members were able to retain their privileged social position and ensure good education for their children, some of whom, like Rena Efendizade and Anna Oltetsian later became architects (Oltetsian’s family was able to survive and prosper during the Soviet power even though her father, an oil magnate, was executed shortly after the revolution). 

In the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, Baku was a multi-ethnic city, populated not only by the Azerbaijanis but also by the Armenians, the Russians, the Jews, the Lezgins, and other ethnic groups. Similarly diverse was the ethnic composition of Azerbaijan architects: working in Baku among their Azerbaijani colleagues were Armenian Anna Oltetsian, Jewish Ritta Tripolskaya, Polish Irena Orlova-Stroganova, and Russian Faina Leontyeva. Some, like Oltetsian, were forced to emigrate in the wake of the transformation of Azerbaijan into a nation state in 1991. In addition, Soviet Azerbaijan included the largely Armenian-populated Nagorno-Karabakh region, which became a source of political instability since the late 1980s, leading to the massacre of Armenian population in Baku in 1990 and to the wars in Nagorno-Karabakh in 1991-1994 and in 2020.

During the Soviet period, the participation of women in economic life, including their education, was encouraged by the state, partially to counteract the social norms of a traditional Muslim society (fig. 1). Many women went to study construction and architecture (for instance, the photograph of the 1958 graduating class of construction engineers at Azerbaijan Polytechnic Institute shows many women), proceeding to work at large offices such as Azgospromproekt, AzerDovlatLayiha, and BakiDovlatLayiha (figs. 2-3). 

Like elsewhere, women tended to remain in junior positions and often remained in the shade of their celebrated male colleagues, such as Mikail Useynov, who worked with Anna Oltetsian and Naima Akhundova but is commonly cited as the solo author of such iconic projects as Azerbaijan and Absheron hotels in Baku. Similarly, the iconic Pearl cafe in Baku is known as the work of the famous architect Vadim Shulgin, while the co-authorship of Irena Orlova-Stroganova and A. [first name and gender unknown] Val are rarely mentioned. Only Shafiga Zeynalova was able to achieve parity with men in terms of designing, as the titular architect, bold and ambitious architectural projects. More often, women tended to work in areas considered less prestigious, such as industrial architecture (Ritta Tripolskaya and Larisa Hamzayeva), sewage and water infrastructure (Firuza Aslanova), or electric engineering (Hamzayeva). They were also present in landscape architecture (Fira Rustambeyova), urban planning (Irena Orlova-Stroganova and Ritta Tripolskaya), and historic preservation (Naima Akhundova, Aurora Salamova, Gulchohra Mammadova). 

Despite these difficulties, however, women in Azerbaijan, particularly those coming from an Azerbaijani background, had greater career opportunities than in most other Soviet republics, frequently rising to the position of the head of a design workshop: examples include Dilara Seyidova, Shafiga Zeynalova, Naima Akhundova, Zeynab Guliyeva, and Avrora Salamova. Seyidova, moreover, was a long-term head of one of the republic’s major design offices, BakiDovlatLayiha. Although main architectural awards in the republic and in the Soviet Union, such as that of “the people’s architect” remained reserved for men, many women were awarded the title “distinguished architect” of Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic.

In Azerbaijan, women were less present in architectural education than in many other Soviet republics. The same 1958 photograph shows no women among the pedagogues of Azerbaijan Polytechnic Institute. Subsequently, Rena Efendizade was able to make a career in research and even to become a department head at a non-teaching institution, the Institute of Architecture and Art of Azerbaijan National Academy of Sciences in the 1990s. In the 2000s, Gulchohra Huseyn Mammadova became the rector of the Azerbaijan University of Architecture and Construction, while Nargiz Abdullayeva became a professor and a vice-rector.