From the publisher:
Zvartnots Airport is an architectural monument of Soviet modernism. Its history began in the early 1970s, when two rounds of the competition took place. Then the architects A. Tarkhanyan, S. Khachikyan and L. Cherkezyan presented two versions in the form of elongated volumes according to the so-called "linear" scheme. However, proceeding directly to the design of the terminal, the authors proposed a fundamentally different concept - a round building. The construction was carried out quickly enough, and Zvartnots opened in 1980. Today, 35 years later, the building has ceased to meet modern requirements for international airports, and the question arose about its future fate. This publication is dedicated to the history of design, construction, the short century of the airport's operation and the struggle to preserve it for future generations. The book is recommended for architects, historians, art historians and a wide range of readers interested in Soviet and Armenian architecture.
The book can be purchased on the website of the TATLIN publishing house.
Space of Zvartnots
The history of the creation of the new terminal of the Yerevan airport began back in 1971-1972, when two rounds of the competition took place. Then A. Tarkhanyan, S. Khachikyan and L. Cherkezyan presented two options in the form of elongated volumes according to the so-called "linear" scheme (such an airport was built in 1980 in Tallinn). However, proceeding directly to the design of the terminal, they proposed a fundamentally different concept - a round building. The construction was carried out quickly enough, and Zvartnots opened in 1980.
“In February 1972, I visited Germany as a member of a delegation,” recalls D. Adbashyan, Honored Pilot of the USSR, in those years the head of the Armenian Civil Aviation Administration. “The Minister of Civil Aviation of the USSR, BP Bugaev, recommended that I study the ideas and solutions laid down in the air terminals of Cologne-Bonn and Frankfurt. What I saw here revolutionized my understanding of airport construction. “The form must match the content! You need to build technological lines on paper, and then enclose them with walls! (This conclusion, which corresponds to the canons of functionalism, is made for himself by the head of the Armenian civil aviation. - KB).
“I brought to Yerevan the drawings received with the help of the Lufthansa airline management from the builders of these airports. the designers of the future Zvartnots were charged with new ideas and technological solutions. As a result, it was conceptually decided to abandon the traditional form of the terminal in the form of a "box", and to find the forms that best meet the requirements of the airport technology. Cologne-Bonn Airport is what we need, everyone decided. And already in April, on behalf of “Armgosproekt”, I presented to Bugaev the drawings and a model of the air terminal, where two galleries went from the central building to the left and to the right at equal angles to two 6-beam stars - terminals, around which each beam had models of 12 aircraft.
Bugaev rejected the project: “Why are you building“Stars of David”in a Christian country? (It is curious that the scheme, presented as purely functional, unexpectedly acquires ideological significance. - KB). And, second, why are you lengthening and confusing the path from car to plane so much? After all, here, through the central building and along the gallery, there will be at least 200 meters, and we don't have moving sidewalks like in Germany. I propose to change the number of beams of the star and to draw a ring road between the beams and the terminals to which they adjoin.
When the next day I told the designers this, Artur Tarkhanyan said that in this case the rays themselves are not needed and suggested that they merge into one common ring. And right there, with a felt-tip pen, he drew a diagram of the future airport terminal, which became the general one”.
The airport got the shape of two truncated cones - a large one (departure area), in one part “torn apart” by a two-level road system, and a small one (arrival area), hidden in a large one. A 61-meter tower protruded from a small cone, completed with a round volume of the restaurant and dispatch service.
The space between the large and small cones at different levels is filled with rings of incoming and outgoing roads. All volumes of the complex are strictly symmetrical and centric, as it should be for round planning decisions. The round shape of the plan allowed to obtain a number of technological and functional advantages, for example, to decentralize departures and, conversely, centralize arrivals and services.
The outer, large cone of the departure area, 504 meters long, was divided into seven micro-stations, serving 300 passengers per hour.
The circular layout of the terminal made it possible to receive aircraft of any size to its “berths”. It was enough just to move them away from the terminal building, as the length of the frontal ring line increased. By moving the aircraft only 1 meter, it was possible to increase the total circumference of the aircraft stands by 6.28 meters.
The technology of movement in the departure area was as follows: a bus or a car drove up to the desired section along the upper ring (its number was indicated on the ticket). Passengers, passing through the automatically opening doors, entered the building - into the "big cone" and literally a few steps (to be precise - 13.5 meters) ended up at the registration desk. Approximately the same number of meters through the control zone and the telescopic ladder had to be passed to the aircraft cabin. “The distance from the doorstep of the car to the doorstep of the plane in Zvartnots was the shortest in the world. At the same time, the threshold of the car, the check-in counter, the baggage acceptance conveyor and the plane were on the same line. So the passenger and his luggage were always moving in the same direction, which excluded the possibility of sending the luggage to the wrong address. This made complex baggage sorting systems unnecessary, as in other air terminals with a traditional technological scheme."
The inner space of the large cone was holistic and continuous, the division into micro-terminals was organized by the rhythmic arrangement of technological equipment, the color alternation of marble cladding of various tones, the protruding inclined planes of the stairs leading to the waiting gallery, and, of course, by the information service system.
Arriving passengers passed through special galleries to the center of the complex, where there were three baggage claim areas, a meeting area, a waiting room, office and other premises. Here, the luggage, moving, like the passenger, all the time to the center, fell on the conveyor circle located opposite the arriving plane.
The small, inner cone - the arrivals area - has been resolved in several levels. To him from the plane, through the same telescopic ladders, passengers passed through the galleries hanging under the plane of the large cone. The galleries culminated in escalators lowering passengers into a small circular arrival hall. The residents of Yerevan have always had a tradition of welcoming visitors, and it was crowded here. It was convenient to meet, because it was easy to see the passengers, as on the plane's ladder, "floating out" in turn on the escalator.
Here, but at lower elevations (the middle, heart-shaped part of the terminal is much lower than the zero level), traffic was organized, and the baggage claim area was located. Taxis and buses drove right up to the sections. A little further and higher, under the cover of the plane of the ring of a large cone, is a parking lot for cars. It was not difficult for arriving passengers to leave the airport with their belongings, however, just as it was for those departing to arrange their departure.
Passengers whose departure was delayed could go from each of the seven micro-stations along the hanging galleries to the small cone, to the waiting room. Above the waiting room there were cafes and other service departments. From here, on the elevators arranged in the trunk of the tower, a two-level multifaceted volume rose into the final vertical of the composition. Here, at the highest level, there was a control room with an excellent view of the airfield and parked aircraft. Directly under the control room there was a restaurant with a unique panorama of Ararat.
The compositional solution of the airport architecture was built on external and internal narratives characteristic of functional architecture: spatial or formal. For example, a gap formed in a large cone by strips of roads, as it were, revealed its internal structure - triangular frames placed in a circle, which form the basis of the supporting structure (the terminal building was built entirely of precast concrete). The ends facing each other - they were filled with plastic stained-glass windows with stylized "aerial compositions" - carried the characteristics of the interior space, at the same time being, as it were, propylae, an external element leading to the "crater" of a large cone, the interior space of which is organized by the forms of external architecture: the small cone was solved in the same compositional way as the large one, the circular ribbons of highways are also an element of external architecture, and finally, the tower that grows from here is the external vertical dominant of the entire composition.
Twelve main spatial levels were vertically interconnected and opened one into another, freely penetrating outside and inside the terminal.
The boundaries between the external and the internal were washed away at many points of the interior, from where different perspectives on external elements that were constantly present in the organization of internal space were revealed. There are many such points, they formed the plot basis of the entire compositional solution.
One of the important lines of opposition external - internal was revealed in the multiple solution of the system of one-flight staircases - vertically assembled into blocks, functionally they were elements of either the interior, or external architecture, uniting the external - internal, being on their border.
An important element of the composition solution is a nakedly protruding external constructive system in the internal space.
"Interior design" was generally reduced to a minimum, the interior space was solved simply, without deliberate decoration: reinforced concrete, covered with plaster or faced with stone. The rational solution coming "from space" was "brought" in the forms: "open" construction, competent use of material, composition subordinate to the functional solution. In the complex organism of a modern airport, technological connections are the most important and easily dominate the architectural solution. Zvartnots violated this canon - architecture has preserved the quality of the unity of the artistic form with the constructive and functional parts, which has become classical.
The spaces of Zvartnots were imbued with an understanding of the professionalism of modern architecture. Professionalism “stretched” through all aspects and individual solutions and inspired in a unified way. An image that is the sum of several terms and at the same time smooths out the one-sided direction of each of them. An image designed to express the idea of movement, plurality, the complexity and perfection of technology, a high level of civilization, the poetics of architectural thought.
When architects created Zvartnots, they undoubtedly saw it in the space of the Ararat plain, drawing in the graphics of the national landscape. Outlining in space the silhouette of the two cones of the air terminal in the context of the eternal peaks of Ararat, the architects also outlined it in time: the ruins of the nearby ancient Zvartnots, which only preserved its round plan - eternal witnesses of the unfading genius of the people - formed a glimpse of time on the round plan of the technological scheme of the air harbor of the capital of Armenia …
Zvartnots in front of Ararat was supposed to remain a spatial and figurative sign. But today the fate of Zvartnots is being decided - to be or not to be, and if so, then not as a terminal, but having received a different function.
The architecture of Zvartnots is built on the principles of functionalism, depriving, as it was said, of its space and its formal language of plots of external and internal. Stylistically, it was architecture called brutal. But it was brutal not only in its philosophy of formal meaning, but also in its not quite ideal execution of the geometry of the lines of concrete pylons and triangular arched structures, metal bindings of glazing structures and design of lighting devices.
For Zvartnots, this was not a secondary factor, because the architecture conceived here required sophistication of execution, which would finally reveal its entire imaginative potential, just as only an impeccable performance can reveal the full depth of a dramatic or musical work. Execution is an important requirement of high art, including the art of architecture.
The problem of modern airports remains the issue of their expansion - aviation is developing rapidly. Zvartnots seemed to have no potential for development. Its rigid sculptural composition is assembled around an inner core. In the future, in order to ensure the increased flows of passengers, Zvartnots was to be copied - a second, similar one was supposed to be built nearby. It always seemed a little strange. But even before that Zvartnots functionally disintegrated: when Armenia became a sovereign country, there was a need for new functions related to overcoming the state border. This was not foreseen in Zvartnots.
