The Skyscraper as Colonial Text: Trump Tower Tbilisi and the Architecture of Brand Imperialism
On April 18, 2026, intelligence aggregator OSINTlive reported that the Trump Organization, in partnership with local Georgian developers, was planning a seventy-story mixed-use skyscraper in Tbilisi. The structure, which would dwarf virtually every building in the Georgian capital, is to carry the Trump name across its facade — gold lettering visible, one presumes, from the surrounding Caucasus hills. The project was confirmed by multiple outlets drawing on the same announcement. It was covered, almost universally, as a business story: a deal, a partnership, a commercial footprint. What it has not been covered as — but what it unambiguously is — is an architectural act of cultural imperialism whose critical analysis requires postcolonial frameworks alongside the sociology of symbolic domination.
Tbilisi is a city of exceptional architectural complexity. Its historic core — the Kala district, the sulfuric bathhouses of Abanotubani, the cliff-side Narikala fortress — reflects nearly two millennia of layered habitation: Kartvelian, Persian, Arab, Byzantine, Ottoman, Russian imperial, and Soviet modernist forms in productive tension. The city's contemporary architectural landscape, troubled and contested since the chaotic privatization of the 1990s, has been the subject of ongoing debates within Georgian civil society about which visions of modernity are imported and which emerge from local practice. Into this landscape, the Trump Organization proposes a seventy-story monolith bearing the name of an American president-businessman — a brand that carries associations not of Georgian modernity but of a very specific American luxury aesthetic: glass, gold, and the vocabulary of mid-century American hotel architecture filtered through the hyperreality of Las Vegas.
Orientalism Inverted
Classic analysis of how dominant cultures project power through knowledge and built form — the East constructed as passive, available for Western interpretation — finds a curious inversion here. The Trump Tower Tbilisi is not a Western text about the Caucasus but a Western artifact in the Caucasus, one that positions the city as a recipient of modernity rather than a producer of it. The seventy-story form is not a neutral architectural choice; it is a quotation from the visual language of Western capitalist urbanism, a grammar developed in New York, Dubai, and Shanghai that carries embedded assumptions about what a successful, modern, investable city looks like.
The Georgian government's participation in or facilitation of this project — the details of which were still emerging at the time of reporting — would constitute a comprador arrangement: local elites accessing global capital by providing the conditions under which global capital can reproduce itself locally, including providing the social permission for a foreign brand to mark the skyline. The building will not house Georgian cultural institutions, public parks, or affordable housing. It will house hotel rooms, luxury apartments, and commercial space — the standard Trump Organization program — generating returns that flow primarily to the Trump Organization's ownership structure and local developer partners, while the visual and urban consequences of a seventy-story tower in a low-rise historic city are borne by residents who had no voice in the decision.
The Brand as Architecture
The sociology of cultural capital applies to brand architecture in ways that the real estate press rarely examines. The Trump name, attached to a building, is not merely a marketing device; it is a claim to symbolic authority — an assertion that proximity to this brand confers value on the surrounding development and, by extension, on the city that hosts it. This is how brand architecture functions: it does not add value through the building's functional or aesthetic qualities but through its capacity to transfer the accumulated prestige of the brand to the location. The building does not need to be beautiful, livable, or contextually appropriate; it needs to be tall, visible, and legible as a marker of the global luxury imaginary.
The cities that have successfully resisted this logic — Riga's old town, protected by UNESCO designation; Edinburgh's Georgian New Town, governed by strict conservation planning — did so through institutional mechanisms that prioritized the city's own architectural heritage over the claims of international capital. Georgia, still consolidating its post-Soviet institutions and subject to intense geopolitical pressure from multiple directions including Russia's ongoing military presence in occupied territories, is in a structurally weaker position to resist such claims. The Trump Tower announcement comes at a moment when Georgia's relationship with both the European Union and the United States is under strain following the ruling Georgian Dream party's drift toward authoritarian consolidation and the suspension of EU accession talks. A major American brand investment in the capital is not disconnected from that political context.
The Skyline as Political Text
Large technological systems are never politically neutral — they embed the values, priorities, and power relations of their creators into their operations. Architecture makes the same argument in concrete and steel. A seventy-story building bearing a brand name is a political text: it asserts whose vision of the future dominates the skyline, whose capital has the authority to reshape a city's visual field, and whose aesthetic preferences constitute the aspirational horizon for a society. When that brand is attached to an individual who is simultaneously the sitting president of the most powerful state on earth and an active figure in the geopolitical pressures bearing on Georgia, the building is not merely architecture — it is an instrument of soft power with a very specific point of origin.
Georgian architects, urban planners, and civil society organizations have previously mobilized against development projects that threatened the historic character of Tbilisi's centre. Whether they will mobilize against this one — and whether they will have the institutional tools to mount an effective challenge — is a question that falls squarely within the domain of cultural politics. The arts desk takes the position that a seventy-story branded skyscraper in a historically complex city is an aesthetic and cultural intervention that deserves exactly the critical scrutiny routinely applied to public sculpture, museum expansion projects, and urban regeneration schemes in Western European capitals.
Monexus covers the architecture of power as well as the power of architecture; this building has not yet been built, but its cultural logic is already legible.