The Tent

[Image: Photograph by Will Webster].

Photographer Will Webster got in touch the other week with a large batch of photos taken behind the scenes of the “world’s largest tent,” designed by Norman Foster, which opened this week in Astana, Kazakhstan.

[Images: Photos by Will Webster].

From the Guardian:

The Khan Shatyr, a 100,000 sq metre complex designed by Lord Foster, holds a city within a city, with shops and restaurants, cinemas, water park, botanical garden, mini-golf course, and a monorail. The aim of the tent is to provide escape to a people subjected to some of the harshest climes of Central Asia’s vast steppe. Temperatures in Astana, in northern Kazakhstan, regularly dip well below -30C in winter.

The “aim of the tent,” of course, is also to monumentalize the ego of Nursultan Nazarbayev, which the Guardian describes as “Kazakhstan’s increasingly autocratic president.”

[Image: Photograph by Will Webster].

But the building was assembled by everyday workers, amidst the mundane landscapes of this growing, purpose-built capital city, watched by Astana’s own residents.

[Images: Photos by Will Webster].

Webster’s photos—a selection of which you see reproduced here—offer a welcome, unpolished, backstage view of the building as its construction approached an end.

[Image: Photo by Will Webster].

Future fun rides sit patiently wrapped in plastic as men in mountaineering gear fix cabled meshes and high-tension wires high inside the volcanic space.

[Images: All photographs by Will Webster].

All told, the building cuts an unlikely profile in its only semi-urban context. At dusk, through Webster’s lens, it looks less like a structure parachuted in from the future, than the shell of an old expo whose excitement has long since faded.

[Image: Photo by Will Webster].

(PS: The abandoned water towers of Webster’s Soviet Farming Project series would also be great to explore at more length).