Bank of Georgia Headquarters (Ministry of Highway Construction Building)

George Chakhava was deputy minister of highway construction for the Georgian SSR when his ministry needed a headquarters, so he wrote the brief and then designed the answer to it, working with Zurab Jalaghania. Built between 1972 and 1975 on a wooded slope in Tbilisi, the building is five horizontal two-storey slabs, each cantilevering far past the one below, crossed over three reinforced-concrete cores that carry every stair and lift; the tallest core is eighteen storeys. Chakhava called the principle the Space City method and held a Georgian patent for it. Its point is that the ground is barely touched: the trees and the hillside run on underneath the offices, which is why the building reads from the road as a stack of boxes floating in a wood. It cost six million roubles and brought him the USSR State Prize in 1983. The Bank of Georgia bought it in 2007, the year it was listed as a monument.