CloseWhere Space Meets a Story!
Eliava Bazaar reimagines one of Tbilisi’s most complex market environments as a contemporary urban district while preserving the spontaneity, diversity, and human energy that define its identity. Through clustered markets and workshops, a new central spine, floating canopies, green public spaces, and clearer movement systems, the project transforms informal complexity into an accessible, resilient, and distinctly local place.
Eliava Bazaar has grown through people rather than through a conventional master plan. Shops, workshops, repair yards, industrial activities, routes, and temporary structures have accumulated over time, creating an environment that can feel chaotic but also possesses a rare urban intensity. The proposal begins by recognizing that this apparent disorder is not something to erase—it is the story of the place. Under the concept “Reforming the Informal,” the design extracts the bazaar’s existing patterns and reorganizes them into legible clusters while preserving the unexpected journeys, encounters, and overlapping activities that make the market authentic. Fragmentation therefore becomes a design tool: the existing idea of one continuous roof is broken into smaller pieces, allowing individual shops to breathe while maintaining the dense, interconnected character of the traditional bazaar.
At the urban scale, movement becomes the framework that brings order without over-controlling the experience. A generous 20–30 metre central spine acts as the bazaar’s primary civic street—a welcoming collector animated by markets, greenery, plazas, events, and everyday social activity. From this spine, more intimate shopping corridors and dedicated logistics routes branch into individual clusters, separating heavy servicing from pedestrian life while keeping every part of the market connected. A dedicated mobility lane supports goods movement as well as cycling, while multiple entrances, pedestrian links, and stronger connections toward the river and west bank extend the bazaar into the wider city. The public realm is deliberately varied rather than uniform: large plazas along the central spine transition into social urban nodes, neighborhood parks, and smaller pocket gardens, creating different speeds and scales of experience throughout the journey.
Architecture grows from the same philosophy. The Floating Canopies reinterpret the bazaar’s recognizable roofscape as a family of elevated, fragmented structures that bring daylight and air deeper into the market while maintaining visual continuity between different activities. Beneath them, flexible commercial and industrial typologies accommodate everything from small kiosks and family-run live-work units to workshops, recycling spaces, factories, and larger market halls—allowing the district to evolve without losing its fine-grain character. Sustainability is embedded into this transformation through retrofitting existing buildings, restricting cars within the pedestrian-oriented areas, creating green buffers, introducing green roofs and solar strategies, improving waste management, and using the open-space network as a channel for natural ventilation and environmental comfort. The result reflects YAAM’s approach to placemaking: not replacing the story of Eliava with a new one, but understanding what already makes the place extraordinary and designing the next chapter around it.