The new multifunctional complex will be built on the slope of the Kanaker plateau, between Abovyan street and Azatutyan avenue, not far from the Victory Park. This is not exactly the center of the city, but geographically a very advantageous place, from where a breathtaking panorama of Yerevan and the valley with the majestic silhouette of Ararat opens. Now this place is an unattractive dusty wasteland, but this was not always the case. Three years ago, the Palace of Youth of Yerevan, built in 1972 according to the project of architects G. G. Poghosyan, A. A. Tarkhanyan and S. E. Khachikyan, stood here. The building, for which its authors received the Central Committee of the Komsomol Prize in the field of architecture, was a giant cylinder, cut with oval eye sockets of window openings and topped with a "flying saucer" observation deck. For more than thirty years, the Youth Palace has remained the tallest building in the Armenian capital and its unofficial symbol, visible from anywhere in the city and familiar to every inhabitant. The people called this object "Krtsats Kukuruz", and even without knowing the Armenian language, one can guess at the similarity of the building with which particular plant the popular rumor hinted at. At the beginning of 2004, the owner of the Yerevan Youth Palace was Avangard Motors LLC - the official dealer of the products of the Daimler Chrysler automobile concern in Armenia. Less than two years after this deal, it suddenly turned out that the skyscraper allegedly did not meet the requirements for seismic resistance, and the authorities of Yerevan agreed to demolish it unusually quickly. In the same year, Avangard Motors promised to implement a bright architectural project on the site of the Youth Palace, worthy of symbolizing Armenia in the XXI century, but none of the proposed options satisfied the City Council of Yerevan. As a result, the developer decided to hold an international architectural competition - by the way, the first in the entire post-Soviet period of the country's history. In total, more than three hundred projects from 70 countries took part in this competition, one of which was carried out by SK&P.
The competition task ordered to design a multifunctional complex so that it would become “the most important urban planning element”. At the same time, the contestants could arrange the office part as they like, but the hotel room should initially have been placed in the western part of the site (this would provide the maximum number of rooms with a city view) and made a dominant, the maximum height of which should not exceed 101 meters. It must be said that for Yerevan, which does not know what skyscrapers are, this is simply a colossal figure, which, by and large, has nothing to oppose to the existing buildings in the city. If the projected complex has a competitor in height, it is the silhouette of Ararat on the horizon.
The role that the biblical mountain plays in the urban planning of Yerevan must be said separately. In the coordinate system of this city, it is Ararat that is the key reference point, the center of gravity of all visual axes. And the mountain influenced its layout in the most direct way - the general plan of Yerevan resembles a giant fan, opened towards the sun and Ararat. So Sergei Kiselev, one might say, did not have to come up with anything: the master plan of the projected complex is exactly the same fan, only in miniature, and its high-altitude part is a man-made mountain range facing its natural "primary source".
In the SKiP project, the complex is divided into two already mentioned functional zones: the western part of the site is occupied by the high-rise volume of the Intercontinental hotel, and the eastern part is occupied by the office center buildings. The division into two parts also remains vertically: the authors separate the traffic and pedestrian flows, giving the cars the lower level of the complex, and the people - the upper platform, as if hovering over the hill. Between the high-rise volumes of the hotel and the lower office blocks, a terraced park is laid out, also oriented towards Ararat. This green wedge not only marks the border of two different zones, but also visually connects the complex with the surrounding parks and in general with the city, which has always been extremely generously greened. And in order to further emphasize the connection with the natural surroundings of the hill, the architects keep the old retaining walls in the western part of the site, and erect the same new ones on the opposite side.
The hotel complex itself consists of three prisms that have the same shape but different heights and are grouped around the inner square. Two of the three buildings - a larger and a smaller one - are occupied by hotel rooms, the middle one is given over to accommodate an apart-hotel. These volumes are united only at the level of the stylobate and the first floor: you can get to any of the buildings, as well as the underground shopping and sports zones, from the central lobby of the hotel. Since the main advantage of the new hotel is its location and views from the window, the main facades of all buildings are made of glass, and the side facades, to which the staircase and engineering risers are facing, on the contrary, are decidedly brutal and decorated with volcanic tuff. Sloped roofs are faced with the same material, so that the buildings resemble rocks extracted from the bowels of the mountains, through which a diamond cutter was walked and on perfectly even cuts the desired mineral appeared in all its glory. The use of tuff is, by the way, very Yerevan-style, because the materials borrowed from the surrounding mountains - tuffs of various shades, felsites, basalts, etc. - give a unique flavor to the architecture of the Armenian capital.
The four buildings of the office part of the complex are also united by a common lobby. Upon closer examination, they turn out to be all the same prisms, only placed on the long side. Even more similar to the composition of the hotel they are given by the sloping surfaces of the roofs, due to which the number of storeys of buildings is gradually increasing, and the silhouette as a whole acquires a resemblance to a mountain range. It turns out as if a small mountain range, with its peak - a hotel and spurs of offices, was taken and cut into neat plates.
The architectonics of the clean, very simple forms of this project forms a kind of "bridge" to the 70's predecessor building. With one amendment: then geological and natural associations were not so relevant. Why the Yerevan hotel complex, as interpreted by the architects of the studio of Sergei Kiselev, is on the verge between the laconicism of prismatic volumes, characteristic of the 1970s, and the "mountain" theme, beloved in our time. Moreover, the solution proposed by SK&P is probably in some ways even laconic and stricter than the previous building of the Youth Palace. So this competition project turns out to be contextual twice: on the one hand, it salutes the biblical grief, on the other, it becomes a memory of the tower of “classical modernism” that stood here. On February 15, the SKiP project will be presented at the exhibition of the Russian participants of the Yerevan competition, which will open at the Museum of Architecture.
