The Biltmore Hotel, Tbilisi: the blue skyscraper

The Biltmore Hotel, Tbilisi: the blue skyscraper - from many perspectives

The five star Biltmore Hotel in Tbiisi, Georgia, is both a renovation and a new building. The entrance on Rustaveli Avenue is the renovation of the 1938 Stalinist building, the previous Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute. (IMELI) The new building is a 32-storey blue skyscraper, commenced in 2015.

Operated by the luxury collection of the Millennium & Copthorne Hotels, the Biltmore Hotel opened on 31 July 2016.

The IMELI building was designed by Alexey Shchusev. The exterior and interior displayed various Georgian marbles and natural stones. In 1986 the building was listed as architectural heritage. After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, it housed the Parliament of Georgia from 1992 to 1995. It was where Georgia’s first post-Soviet Constitution was adopted on 25 August 1995. Later, it was the Constitution Court of Georgia and the Central Election Commission office.

IMELI 1938

Biltmore Hotel, Tbilisi, 2015

In 2007 it was sold to the Capital Vostok company with the intention to build a luxury five-star Kempinksi Hotel to be designed by Berlin-based architects Christoph Kohl and Rob Krier. In the process of renovation, the investor started to demolish the building without permission and IMELI some of its original elements, leading to protests from preservationists. By 2008, the building was sold to the Abu Dhabi United Group, which agreed to stop demolition and preserve the historical façade of the building. In 2011, there was more controversy when the new investor was granted permission to construct, next to the Shchusev building, a 300-metre-high glass skyscraper, connected to the IMELI building via a glass walkway.

MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of:- The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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