Yerevan was founded in 782 BC. But the period of its architecture, which we are now discussing, refers to the 19th - early 20th centuries, when the city was part of the Russian Empire.
In 1827, General Paskevich's troops occupied the Yerevan fortress and recaptured Eastern Armenia from Persia. In the next year, 1828, by the decree of Emperor Nicholas I, the Armenian region was formed with the center in Yerevan, which includes the Yerevan and Nakhichevan khanates, as well as the Ordubad district. In Russian transcription, the city is called Erivan (renamed to Yerevan in 1936). The preservation of fragments of the Erivan period is also discussed in two comments by Andrey Ivanov ("Transplantation for" Old Yerevan "and" Should you be like salmon? Old Yerevan is already in the center of the capital ").
I am quite familiar with the problem, and with a little history, I want to share my opinion. Towards the end of the 19th century, the construction of a city with a regular plan began on the site of the existing chaotic, "Asian" development (several central streets, including those forming the projected quarter, were built only in 1900). The street grid was laid from north to south along the relief down and along the relief from east to west. The relief lowered towards the Zangu (Hrazdan) river canyon, on the left bank of which the city was located. From the right bank, on one of the hills of which General Paskevich successfully positioned his guns and attacked the city fortress, the gardens of the Ararat valley began, which ended with an incomparable panorama of the biblical mountain.
Erivan houses were built of local stone - homogeneous pliable black tuff, and later, in the entourage of pink-cream Yerevan of the 20th century, they would begin to be called “black houses” (houses were rarely built of red tuff or bricks). Basically, these were one- and two-storey buildings, with carefully executed facades with a peculiar interpretation of classical forms, rarely - modern. In the plan, they are usually rectangular or L-shaped, with a gallery open to the side of the courtyard, to which the living quarters looked out. An orchard was laid out on the inner territory of the house (as you know, delicious fruits grow in the Ararat Valley, Yerevan has always been famous for its gardens and the idea of building a garden city for Tamanyan was also obvious for this reason).
The stone houses were mainly owned by the city's Armenian elite. One of these houses in 1910 on Nazarovskaya Street was built by my mother's grandfather, a doctor at the Echmiadzin throne Karapet Ter-Khachatryants. It was not so luxurious, but very well built house. Modern materials brought from Europe were used in its decoration.
In 1923, the houses belonging to the Yerevan bourgeoisie were nationalized. For example, my mother's family was left with two rooms, new tenants were moved into the rest (after the genocide of 1915, some of the people who escaped from the Turkish scimitar ended up in Yerevan, and an acute housing crisis arose in the city; Tamanyan draws attention to this in the reports on the master plan).
The Soviet seal became a time bomb for the Erivan development. That which belonged to one family and was carefully kept became nobody's. The houses were haphazardly rebuilt, disfigured, in fact, destroyed from the inside.
According to the general plan of Tamanyan (approved in 1924), the rectangular grid of the plan is basically preserved, but, naturally, it is subordinated to the new, much larger and fundamentally different urban planning concept of the capital of Armenia. Some believe that Tamanyan's plan was a “death sentence” for the Erivan development. This is not entirely true.
In his dreams, Tamanyan undoubtedly imagined Yerevan as a holistic one, in a single architectural style created by him.“He probably saw a sunny city,” Charents will say in the poems written for the death of the architect. But Tamanyan did not have time to plan Yerevan in detail, and in his descriptions of the city he presented it with built-up houses of only two or four floors. He was a realist. Combining the city plan with the existing buildings, he probably did it in order to preserve valuable and useful buildings.
During the Stalinist period, when a totalitarian city plan (1949) was developed instead of Tamanyan's national plan, entire streets were destroyed. For example, Amiryan Street (formerly Nazarovskaya) was expanded and the entire left side of the building was demolished (including the house of the doctor Ter-Khachatryants).
A strong blow to the buildings in Erivan was dealt during the period of the modernist reconstruction of Yerevan, when the Main Avenue was opened, and many "black houses" were destroyed in significant spaces between two parallel streets. The avenue was designed as a boulevard with fountains (architect A. Zaryan). On one of its sections, it is now supposed to implement the project of "Old Yerevan", having collected here essentially everything that remains of the Erivan building.
Having said “for” or “against” this project, I would put an end to this. But the question is that outside this space there are still old, dilapidated, but undoubtedly of historical and artistic value houses, which are also supposed to be moved. That is, break down and reassemble.
The attitude towards heritage in general changed in the 1980s. Along with the ancient monuments, they began to pay attention to the ordinary buildings of the cities of the recent past. The historical reserve Kumayri was formed (the Soviet city of Leninakan; architects S. Kalashyan, S. Grigoryan), with ordinary buildings from the same period. In Yerevan, first of all, through the efforts of M. Gasparyan (a researcher of architecture of the 19th - early 20th centuries) and L. Vardanyan (the author of the current project), the “black houses” were given a protective status. The list of monuments included, if my memory serves me right, 172 buildings, mainly residential buildings, but including several public buildings (the parliament building of the First Republic, several gymnasiums, etc.). It was a very significant event. But not everyone in society was ready to perceive the value of these buildings. After all, the process of their decay and self-destruction only intensified, as did the contrast with the surrounding Soviet multi-storey buildings.
I remember that I visited a well-known doctor, who, upon learning that I was working in the system of protecting monuments, asked me to argue the value of the “black houses” and the expediency of their preservation. Then for many it was not at all obvious. Nowadays, every old house looks like an elegant arabesque against the background of modern gigantic soulless buildings. Or again not?
Having protected the "black houses" from destruction, it was necessary to give an urban planning answer about their integration into the context of the even larger (up to 10-11 floors) buildings. By the end of the decade, on behalf of the Academy of Sciences, I developed a theoretical concept for connecting two layers of the city - the old and the new. The project was based on the project of the famous modernist, the author of the famous summer hall of the Yerevan cinema "Moscow" Spartak Kntekhtsyan (the young architect Hov. Gurjinyan participated in the project). It was also a cinema project for children. For its construction, a plot was allocated on the Main Avenue, where there were three "black houses". According to the project, they were to be preserved, restored, adapted for use, and it was proposed to "hang" the cinema above them, resting the main volume in the form of an inverted arch on four pylons - "legs". Thus, a two-scale composition was created. The cinema, standing flush with the surrounding buildings, constituted the upper modern scale of the center of Yerevan, while at the bottom of its natural life the old Erivan layer of the city continued to exist.
It was the right move (other projects were developed according to this scenario), but implementation was postponed. I have spoken in print many times in support of Kntekhtsian's project, generalizing his methodology and substantiating the need to preserve the "old Erivan". In a certain year, for these publications, I received an award from the Union of Architects of the USSR. But the situation did not change (it is true, and the "black houses" did not collapse, they only became more and more dilapidated).
In recent years, the situation has deteriorated sharply. The intrinsic value of the old buildings has been replaced by the price of land in the center of Yerevan. There were a lot of "black houses"
demolished. For example, huge (even in relation to modern Yerevan) residential buildings have been built on the site of the alleged children's cinema. At the same time, there are rare examples when separate, still existing old buildings turned out to be successfully adapted for a popular restaurant and souvenir shop (shown in the photo in the material of A. Ivanov).
Levon Vardanyan made an attempt to save the rest by gathering them into a single space. The former mayor liked this idea: after all, in this case, as they say, “both the sheep are safe and the wolves are fed”. I don't like this approach. First of all, methodologically. He is simple and overly pragmatic. Focused on a specific or hypothetical developer. To his benefit: he liked the place - you can remove the old building, free up the site. This creates, accordingly, opportunities for corruption. But, most importantly, it simplifies the very concept of "city". Turns it into a new building.
It was on the basis of such a simplified attitude towards the city that the same former mayor allowed the destruction of the house of the USSR people's architect Rafo Israelian, intended for the museum. Meanwhile, in the artists' quarter where it was located, it was possible to order a much more sophisticated and complex project, which, I am sure, would include not only great value, but also great benefit.
It may seem that I am contradicting myself when I do not equate Tamanyan's method with the actions of modern urban planners. However, these are really hard to compare concepts. Tamanyan created a model of a national city that was perfect in terms of spatial solution, one might say, played a complex chess game, where the “chess player” makes conscious sacrifices on the way to victory. What is being done now is a simple game of checkers, when one piece "eats" another and takes its place (or something analogous to a modern computer game).
For some reason, Yerevan city planners walk (or are being led) along the simplest road, forcing them to choose the lesser of evils (as in this case, when L. Vardanyan himself claims that he has to deal with the transfer of old buildings). But this path is very far from the modern methods of developing the old city environment and actually leads to the destruction of the old layers of the city. (True, this is not only the "Yerevan" way, but one can say: "post-Soviet"; it exists in different forms, depending on the specific situation, in many former Soviet cities, and I think it would not be useless to discuss this common for all problem at a scientific conference or round table).
What I support in this case is to restore everything that was destroyed. If, of course, at least the stones of the facades, as we are assured, have survived. As for the still existing buildings, then keep everything that is left in place. Rebuild and adapt to use. As you can see from the example of Kntekhtsyan's project, it is quite realistic to design modern large buildings without trampling old ones. But to work according to such a method, one cannot be limited to individual point solutions, even if they are talented. It is necessary to develop a holistic concept for the entire historical center, where its old historical fragments and new inclusions will merge into a single understanding of the city's environment. Today, the city, its inhabitants, and the professional community need to form a new urban planning thinking. So far, this is not the case, the main condition is the availability of a free site that is beneficial for the developer. Or the need to create it.
Don't destroy old buildings.
Karen Balyan, professor of MAAM
