The architecture of Armenia for the Russian and international reader is associated mainly with medieval temple architecture. These buildings have become a symbol of Armenian culture, in the shadow of which is the modern Armenian architecture. In recent years, thanks to the efforts of the historian and theorist Karen Balyan, considerable steps have been taken to study modern Armenian architecture, in particular, the buildings of the era of Soviet modernism. However, for objective reasons, the post-Soviet architecture of Armenia is not of particular interest to international theorists and critics - which is quite understandable, given the quality of the new architecture and its general traditionalist orientation.
However, contrary to this trend, in recent years, buildings have begun to appear in the country, which may well be interesting in a global context. It is noteworthy that they are located mainly outside the capital, or at least not in the center of Yerevan. Unfortunately, due to various objective and subjective factors, these projects in Armenia were not perceived as important architectural phenomena and, moreover, did not gain international recognition. These buildings remain as islands of modern architecture and are often even ignored in conservative architectural circles. In this article, I would like to present two schools that have been built in recent years. They are breaking the mainstream of high school architecture and claiming to be educational points of attraction for the world.
Ayb School
The Ayb Educational Foundation, created in 2006, set itself the task of building a unique school in Armenia for gifted children, embodying a new format of education, consonant with the 21st century. It was a large-scale national idea of development: the founders of the fund, first of all, attached importance to investments in the future of the country, that is, in teaching the new generation. It should be noted that the educational complex was fully built with donations from benefactors. Initially, the investors intended to attract foreign architects to implement this idea, it was supposed to organize a closed international competition. In particular, negotiations were underway with such eminent professionals as Bill Mitchell, who led the expansion of the MIT campus, and the founder of the prominent Chinese bureau MADA s.p.a.m. Qingyun Ma. However, due to financial difficulties in 2009, the organizers abandoned big ambitions and entrusted the project to the young Yerevan
Bureau "Storaket" (translated from Armenian - "comma", which is reflected in the logo of the bureau), which at first was only asked to develop a competition task.
In October 2011, the construction of the first building - A was completed. This is one of the few post-Soviet projects in Yerevan, which in its essence, task, execution, approach claims to be relevant in a global context. It appeared in an undeveloped area in the north of the Armenian capital, next to the Tbilisi highway and the Kanaker hydroelectric station. The most notable building nearby is the building of the Sparkling Wine Factory (architect Zaven Bakhshinyan, 1948), and this territory itself has been used as a driving school site since Soviet times. There were also unfinished, abandoned buildings from the 1980s, one of which, due to a positive technical conclusion, was preserved at the initiative of the architects.
Contrary to the opinion of many older colleagues, the young architects did not get rid of this nondescript building, but found the most adequate solution to adapt it for new use, which determined the morphotype of the new school.
In general, the building has a dynamic aesthetics: it is a fractional composition of autonomous volumes.
The façade combines gray basalt, white plaster and contrasting accents of orange portals and window frames (orange is the color of the Ayb Foundation logo), which brightly complement the gray and white range. Interestingly, facing basalt left over from the 1980s was used.
The entrance to the territory is marked with a massive concrete frame on which the name "Ayb" is carved.
The interiors of the school are also characterized by bright, free solutions. Inside the hall, the second floor is connected to the first by a toboggan slide, along which children go down to the gym.
And from the third floor to the second, students can go down the spiral tobogan, the shape of which is reflected on the facade of the building, which was one of the original accents of the project.
After the completion of this building, the design of the second building - B was started, which was completed a year later - in 2012. Building B adjoins building A, becoming its physical and compositional continuation. It was built on the foundations of a previous unfinished building that influenced its structure. Aesthetically, it is designed as a part of Building A: the first floor is plastered in gray and the second in white, and tape windows are used there. The broken lines of the second floor visually indicate its depth. Initially, the building was planned as a two-story building, but after that a third floor was added, which gave it massiveness, therefore, in an effort to lighten the visual load, the upper volume was made as transparent as possible.
The complex includes laboratories "Fab-Lab", which are made of containers.
In 2015, construction began on building C.
The Ayb Educational Center project involves the construction of a whole complex. So, while senior and junior classes are located in adjacent buildings A and B, in the future, each of these two groups of students will receive its own building.
Dilijan Central School
Dilijan is a small town in the north of Armenia, north of Lake Sevan, located in a picturesque mountain landscape. The city gained worldwide fame with the opening of the UWC College network there (project by Tim Flynn Architects). The post-Soviet change in Dilijan began thanks to then-Prime Minister Tigran Sargsyan, who wanted to make Dilijan a financial center. Therefore, the Central Bank of Armenia was the first to move there and opened its branch there. To attract its employees to the province, that is, to create attractive living conditions there for them, the bank, among other things, decided to build a modern school, which had no analogues even in the capital. To implement this idea, including determining the format of the future school, the bank invited the Ayb Educational Foundation, which already had experience in creating a modern educational institution. At first, it was planned to build a new school on a slope at the entrance to the central part of the city, but geological studies showed that the soil there was unreliable.
Bureau "Storaket" managed to complete a draft design for this site, which assumed a new method of organizing space, expressed in the original form.
The prototype for the new school, according to the authors' idea, was the traditional Dilijan "cantilever" houses with a gable roof, which are perceived as autonomous facades, chaotically located on the slopes, protruding from under the trees.
This idea is also incorporated in the implemented project of the "Storaket" bureau.
The construction of the school began in the fall of 2013, the official opening took place on September 24, 2015, but the school has already been operating since February this year. The selected territory is located in the Shamakhyan region, next to the residential buildings built by the forces of the Moldavian SSR after the 1988 Spitak earthquake.
This residential area was supposed to stretch to the west, to the location of the current school, but the collapse of the USSR prevented the implementation of these plans. However, unfinished buildings and pits remained in this place. When designing, the architects took into account the contours of these pits, which influenced the formation of the structure of the building, and the retaining wall that existed in this place became the compositional axis of the school. The project also included relief differences at the site.
The building consists of two asymmetric compositions, which are composed of four main buildings (B, D, D, E), located at an angle of 45 ° and separated by building A, which runs along the compositional axis. The enclosures differ in their function.
Building A is an exclusively communication block connecting four buildings and entrance groups. On the ground floor there are entrances and technical rooms, on the upper floor there is a corridor. The body is designed as a neutral volume covered with white plaster. On its roof, circular light openings are made, reminiscent of the techniques of Soviet modernism. The entrance for the administration is on the north side, and for the students on the south.
Two-storey buildings B and E are located on the right side of building A. In them, respectively, the middle classes and a hall with circles are located. Buildings D and D are one-story and are located to the left of building A. There are junior classes (building D) and an administrative block (building D). This approach is driven primarily by evacuation considerations so that younger children can leave the building directly from their classroom. The area between buildings D and D was trapezoidal due to the small distance between these structures.
Despite the division into buildings, the architects sought to link the school complex into a single space. Additional connections were created, in particular, by the Fab-Lab building between buildings B and E: its roof serves as a terrace. In addition, from the courtyard between buildings D and D through the corridor you can get to the assembly hall.
An important role in the structure of the building is played by the volumes of classrooms located on the second level, interpreted as small houses with a gable roof covered with corrugated board.
Their fractional composition does not have a specific system, and the resulting image resembles a showroom
VitraHaus of the Herzog de Meuron office in Vejle am Rhein. But, like in Ayb School, the building does not have a single visual axis, so it looks different from different angles and is generally perceived as a set of disparate forms, where both traditionalist and modernist approaches appear. Thus, the visual load is uniform, since with the “accent” architecture of the “houses”, the white volumes, acting as an aesthetic background, also claim to be active with the help of their bright, asymmetrically located window openings.
The autonomous solution of volumes and facades is characteristic of the creative method of the Storaket bureau, which was expressed in both school buildings. They are characterized by a certain postmodern approach without a specific stylistic and compositional emphasis, where the volumes are not divided into primary and less important.
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Both schools are separated from the urban context. Both of them were created as “breakthrough points” for the development of the city and the country as a whole. They are also among the unfortunately few examples of successful non-commercial architecture in Armenia, where architecture as such plays a primary role, in contrast to the prevailing commercial and residential buildings, where architecture is being pushed out under pressure from commercial interests. Both buildings defined a new format for school architecture and became the most significant projects for the young bureau. According to their decision, they are some kind of islands in their surroundings, however, if Ayb is not connected by its architecture with the city and the environment, then the Dilijan school directly seeks to cite the local context.
I would not like to give an unambiguous assessment of how the implemented projects are at the level of world architectural trends, etc. However, the very fact of the emergence of architecture of this level in post-Soviet Armenia is already very significant. The language of architecture in these buildings is modern, although not primary on a global scale. Modern architecture, in principle, did not play a dominant role in the modern history of Armenia: traditionalist trends and styles supplanted modernism. The only period when Armenian architecture kept pace with world trends was the 1920s, the era of constructivism.
There are also a number of successful modernist buildings in the 1960s.
Otherwise, it has developed and is developing in line with local, conservative trends.
