Discovering the architecture of Armenia's capital Yerevan, and its Soviet modernism

Contrary to what one might think, the history and the construction of the architectural image of Yerevan, the ancient capital of Armenia, have rather young roots. If the first settlements of the city date back to 782 B.C., few signs of the urban past are still visible today. The ruins of the ancient fortress of Erebuni stand out on the hill of Arin Berd, now enriched by the presence of a museum built in 1968 to celebrate the city’s 2,750th anniversary.
Of the medieval legacy is the small Katoghike church, whose construction can be dated to 1264, the only survivor of the demolitions propagated by the Soviet regime and the bombings of the Second World War, while from the so-called Persian period (attributable to the 16th to 19th centuries) the Blue Mosque still remains, now completely incorporated within the 20th century fabric of Yerevan.
An initial urban plan for the modernization of the city was drawn up between 1906 and 1911, establishing the layout of the main axes and their orientation in a definitive manner for what would become the main urban development plan of Yerevan, drafted in 1919, in the aftermath of the October Revolution, by Alexander Tamanyan, and finally approved in 1924.

The new urban design further accentuates the European-style character of the already orderly grid prepared with the previous plan, placing a large circular boulevard called to act as a green lung for the city, and evoking the ideal of the Garden City theorized by the English urbanist Ebenezer Howard. Regarding the stylistic image that the city was to have, Tamanyan’s ambition was oriented towards a kind of national neoclassicism, where the motifs of traditional Armenian architecture merged with the proportions of the classical order. An idea partly preserved in the realization of the city’s representative buildings (the Government Palace, as well as the Opera House, both completed after Tamanyan's death in 1940, portray the more classical image of which the Armenian urbanist was the spokesman), but the complete realization of Tamanyan’s masterplan under the Soviet regime saw the flourishing of a coexistence of languages, especially in the Armenian interpretation of Constructivism and modernist architecture.
A key figure in the application and interpretation of Tamanyan’s plan in the 1970s was the architect Jim Torosyan, to whose name are linked many of the buildings that today constitute the character of the Armenian capital, and who better than others succeeded in translating this fusion of stylistic identities that still gives Yerevan the image of a true urban workshop.

Then the great Cascade complex (1980), which from the heart of the city continues northwards along one of the main urban axis, develops in a sequence of five terraces, decorated with massive and geometric motifs, to ideally reach the Monument dedicated to the Fiftieth Anniversary of Soviet Armenia (1970), an obelisk and a bare basalt slab, resting on a two-terraced system above the city.
The underground station complex in the Republic Square (1980), with its hypogeal fountain and the lower square entirely dug out of pink tuff and placed under a flower-shaped canopy supported by curved pillars, pays homage to local craft traditions, while the high arches defining the perimeter of the buildings behind the square are molded in tuff as if they were bas-reliefs emerging from the material, framing bundles of windows.

The luminous tunnel of the Yeritasardakan station (1981) breaks through the underground access square and re-emerges from the soil like the remains of an urban wreckage, while the Hrazdan stadium (1970) is shown in the full ‘brutality’ of its structure, sectioned longitudinally and transversally just by the concrete bleachers; the lines of the Karen Demirchyan complex for sports events and concerts (1976-1983) are more expressionistic, with its four structural ribs literally embracing and covering the various halls inside.

Differently ‘raw’ is the materiality of the Tsitsernakaberd Memorial (1968) dedicated to the victims of the Genocide, with its 12 basalt slabs ripping through the platform beneath them, tilting and generating a silent place of recollection within them, while on the giant pedestal of the Altar of Mother Armenia, erected in 1950, the figure of a woman about to draw her sword in defense of the city proudly rises.  

Moreover, the Polytechnic Institute building, the Rossiya Cinema, the Tigran Petrosyan Chess Players' House, built between the mid-1960s and early 1980s, as well as a number of more or less common buildings in Yerevan, being a police office or the Kilika Bus Station, are characterized by a strongly sculptural tension that merges exposed concrete and local stones (pink tuff among them) in the repeated generation of decorative and structural motifs. Formworks that become skins applied to the building create extremely recognizable visual patterns, sometimes geometric, sometimes organic, are combined with elements of an artistic nature, such as the ‘talking’ bas-reliefs created by David Yerevantsi, applied to the bare façade of the Chess Players' House, and revealing its function without requiring any particular effort of interpretation.

In this landscape of colors and textures, it is not surprising that the more functional urban elements maintain the same character of plasticity, so that an architectural barrier of streer separation moves like a wave along Proshyan Street, and the two discs of the cableway on Koryun Street echo in the cylinder of the adjacent spiral staircase, in stark contrast to the essential orthogonal lines of the two pillars and one beam that make up the descent portal to the lower level.  In a markedly European urban layout, the buildings are finally conceived as true landmarks, testimonies of the contradiction and its elaboration and acceptance, of the affirmation of an identity, which in its desire for autonomy inevitably comes to terms with the complexity of the signs left by more than 50 years of regime, but which, nevertheless, had the courage to make them its own, assimilating them into authentic and original forms. So powerful that even the most recent architecture struggles to tale a distance from them, at times risking to get lost in the easy and anachronistic citationism.