Architecture and friendship among nations: the shifting politics of cultural diplomacy in Tbilisi, Georgia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 1938, the Soviet Georgian administration inaugurated the iconic Institute of Marx, Engels, and Lenin (IMEL) in Tbilisi under pretences of socialist unity and friendship among Soviet nations. Three quarters of a century later, the same building – now privatised, heavily renovated, and re-branded – was re-inaugurated as the seven-star Biltmore Hotel. The hotel’s grand opening included an enormous video projection on the western façade, telling the story of a new friendship among nations, this time between independent Georgia and the United Arab Emirates as the hotel’s financiers. This article tracks the shifting politics of cultural diplomacy associated with this adaptive reuse project. It contributes to a growing body of scholarship on cultural diplomacy by delving deeper into the social, political, and economic implications surrounding the particular use of friendship rhetoric in such practices. In doing so, it charts the manipulation of architecture to communicate international cooperation and the power of its patrons. Drawing from archival sources, field observations, media analysis, and focus groups, the work argues that, rather than an outmoded means of public service announcement, symbolic architecture continues to be a crucial arena for state politics, one entangled with new modes of spectacle in the city.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.021 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".