Darbazi Dialogues is a field school and research platform based in the high, cold, and arid regions of Georgia—Samtskhe-Javakheti. Here, we have organized our fieldwork around the darbazi (დარბაზი)—one of the three or four most prototypical house-types of Georgia. Architecturally, the darbazi is a partially underground dwelling, characterized by a more or less elaborate wooden roof structure constructed by the stacked corbeling of large timbers to form a partial-domed roof. This corbeled roof is itself covered in a carefully layered set of materials—thin slate, rot-resistant wooden boughs, topped by a thick layer of earth—producing a dwelling that is less a building on the landscape than one that is a constituent element of that landscape. And while the central, corbelled chamber is indeed the ceremonial and architectural center of the house, a single dwelling complex is generally composed of an aggregation of other rooms for sleeping, storage, cooking, and animal husbandry. Our interest in the darbazi, then, spans from its architectural and structural articulation through an expanded cohabitation of human and non-human animals to the reworking of geology and landscape itself.
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