Nestled into the ramshackle topography of Tbilisi's historic district, the Unfinished House by David Brodsky and Alexander Brodsky is less a building and more a palimpsest.
Standing as the third iteration of a structure originally constructed in the 1920s, the house has been reassembled from its own ruins and those of its city. What emerges is not nostalgia, but a quietly radical rethinking of what it means to inhabit time, texture, and collective memory.
The Brodskys' approach eschews monumentality. Instead, it engages in a kind of architectural archaeology — repurposing handmade cement blocks, local timber, and Soviet-era glass bricks with a tactile humility that resists clean lines and perfect finishes. There's a gentle violence to the material layering, as if the house wears its former lives like sediment. Traces of previous uses are neither concealed nor fetishised, but rather accepted as companions in the present.
At the heart of the project is a belief in social architecture. The construction phase was less a conventional build than a site of pedagogical improvisation: students, friends, and craftspeople all took part in the design’s evolution. Workshop spaces on-site became informal studios where materials were transformed and methods exchanged. It’s an anti-corporate model of making — deeply local, necessarily experimental, and allergic to hierarchy.
Functionally, the house balances privacy with public potential. While primarily a family home, the ground floor opens up into a flexible cultural space — a modest but potent gesture toward civic generosity. The new flat-roof terrace echoes the typology of Tbilisi’s baniani houses, referencing both shared history and social permeability. This architecture does not close in on itself; it listens, adapts, and occasionally invites you in.
Inside, the contrast between exposed stonework and pale joinery reveals a domesticity that is both robust and tender. Light moves through the glass blocks like a diffused memory, softening the grain of reused materials. The spaces feel provisional — not in the sense of being incomplete, but as if they’re open to being rewritten, rearranged, and reimagined. The house makes room for the lives that will inhabit it, without prescribing how they should unfold.
The Unfinished House does not aspire to completion. It is an architecture of continuity — a poetic, quietly defiant refusal of the new-for-new’s-sake. In its unfinishedness, it becomes a model for how buildings might grow old without growing obsolete, and how the act of reconstruction can itself become a form of care.
