At the end of 1918, after the collapse of the Russian Empire, an independent state emerged in a small fragment of the historical Eastern Armenia. This was the First Republic of Armenia. Two years later it turned into the Second Republic or Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic, which existed tuntil 1991. The restoration of the Armenian state was the result of the First World War. In this period, the historical Western Armenia was part of Ottoman Turkey; the latter carried out the genocide of the native Armenian population, claiming 1.5 million innocent lives. One of the main points of the national project for the restoration of the Armenian state was the lay out of the general plan for the capital city Yerevan. This project was started by the First and continued by the Second Republic. Planned was the transformation of the provincial Russian centre Erivan (that is how Yerevan appears in Russian transliteration until 1936) into a capital city thus amounted to the building of the new city.
Realisation of this mega-project was the main goal that brought the exiled Armenian academic of architecture Alexander Tamanian back to the historical motherland. 1924 the Soviet Commissariat of Armenia approved Tamanian’s general plan for the capital city. Independence, democracy, national traditions and the unity of the people scattered across the world due to the consequences of genocide – these were the main aspects that might have found expression in the general plan of Yerevan, the capital of Armenianhood.
The city is situated at the foot of the biblical mountain Ararat, one of the most gorgeous and stately peaks on Earth. The visible part of the Greater Ararat is approximately 4300 metres high. The Armenians, who have lived at the foot of the Ararat since ancient times, consider the double-headed mountain to be their national symbol. It is not surprising that Ararat has appeared as a main spatial orientation and the conceptual core of Tamanian’s plan. «Urbi et orbi» – «to the city and to the world»: the city plan has been developed according to this Roman expression.
The lay out of Yerevan was based on the classical canons that Tamanian knew from Saint Petersburg. He enlarged a rectangular grid that had been well known since the nineteenth century. At its very centre, a wide main avenue links up a circle of boulevards with a square. A second main square «Teatralnaia» (The Theatre Square) is situated to the north and links up with the central diagonal connection – the Northern Avenue. The entire composition of the city overlooks the gigantic natural top of the double-headed Ararat, thus presenting as a single whole both the urban planning and the national landscape. Tamanian subordinated the entire dramaturgy of urban planning to the stately scale of the mountain’s beauty.
Although Tamonian took the canons of the classical and national traditions as the basis for the urban planning and architectural forms of Yerevan, the ethical side of his activity had, strictly speaking, a modernist direction, the aim of which was to realise a conception of the exclusively new city. The process of planning and building had a dramatic history. Tamanian de facto settled on a secret deal with Soviet power, in which he agreed to become its hostage in exchange for the realisation of his own ideas. It has to be acknowledged that Tamanian’s expectations worked out only because they were based on the «life-building» mechanisms (a concept of Soviet political and art theory) that were declared by Soviet power under the banner of «the renaissance of the nations that were oppressed by tsarism». From the point of view of personal and national freedom this banner was false. Colossal repression had taken place under the Soviet power, including discrimination on account of ethnic descent and, for example, the exile of thousands of Armenian families to Siberia and Northern Kazakhstan after the Second World War. Nevertheless, this banner was thoroughly applicable to Soviet economic planning, and by virtue of this planning it was possible to begin the process of constructing the new city.
Tamanian began the realisation of the general plan, and from 1927 onwards the ideas of avant-garde constructivist architecture began to enter Armenia. The adherents of these ideas were graduates of famous Moscow’s Vkhutemas – among Bauhaus in Germany, it was the most important centre of the European artistic avant-garde of the 1920-1930s.
Tamanian never accepted, in any form, the ideas of avantgarde architecture. In turn, the constructivists launched fierce attacks on Tamanian’s conceptions, considering them traditionalist and inadequate to the zeitgeist of the epoch. Their critique was directed just as much towards the formal language of his architecture as it was towards the structural principles of urban development and the layout of Yerevan. A theoretical proposition of the avant-gardists underwent its practical realisation. For the short period from 1929 to 1931 many constructivist buildings were built. In this regard, the traditional «ribbon development» of the Tamanianian plan was seemingly contradicted by the dynamic compositions of the constructivists, which were characterised by inward-directed, squared-off neighborhoods, or else by the asymmetrically designed angular parts of the districts.
However, Soviet architectural development took a new turn after the announcement of the first round results at the contest for The Palace of the Soviets in Moscow (end of 1931) and the Resolution of 1932 (the latter of which resulted in the avant-garde falling out of favour and its replacement by classical forms). This brought about what was to be the principal transformation of the architectural process in Armenia. Tamanian once again appeared as a leader of Armenian architecture. He headed the planning commission at the Yerevan City Council’s Executive Committee, i.e. controlled the enforcement of his own general plan. However, Tamanian was no longer able to be as active as he had been. He tried to spend the rest of his creative energy on the completion of the lay out of People’s House, the construction of which had remained intermittent.
Tamanian died in Yerevan in 1936, at a time when none of the ideas of his general plan had yet been accomplished. When Yerevan buried the great reformer, the coffin with his body was set in the wall of a socle at the People’s House’s construction site. Realisation of the Circular Boulevard, the Main and the Northern Avenues will establish the scope of activity for the next generations of Armenian city planners. Will their decisions correspond to the ideas of the founder of the city?
Tamanian died on the eve of cruel events in the history of the Soviet Union and in the history of Armenia. In the fall of 1937 there was a change of power in Armenia and the totalitarian course carried out by Stalin’s local myrmidons was entirely approved in the republic. The machinery of repression had started to work. It destroyed the Armenian creative elite. The heads of the republic underwent repression too. The national idea behind the general plan was rejected and effectively repressed. All spatial and compositional decisions that expressed this idea were changed. An extant document calls the Tamanian’s plan bourgeois, meaning that it is based on Ebenezer Howard’s garden city, but it is also labelled nationalist with regard to its spatial ideas. Finally, it is called «Dashnaktsutyunian», with reference to its sponsors, the leaders of the First Republic (this amounts to the most serious accusation of support for anti-Soviet ideology). And if in the period of constructivism Tamanian was blamed for traditionalism and for the use of obsolete architectural forms, in the period of Stalinist totalitarianism his architecture began to be defamed as modernist. These charges were brought against a chief architect of the city, Buniatian, who was responsible for implementation of the general plan. He was therefore arrested.
The «correction» of Tamanian’s general plan concerned all of its key points. In Tamanian’s plan, several beams radiate from the main square. The Northern Avenue axis was one of the beams directed towards Ararat. In this way, the square commands a fine panoramic view of Ararat. Simultaneously, the mountain becomes a part of the square’s own composition. An arch blocked two buildings flanking this beam. This narrowed the view of Ararat to a minimum. As a matter of fact, Ararat was excluded from the ensemble of the central square. Instead of a diagonal direction towards Ararat, there emerged a transversal axis with a monument to Lenin and a very unimpressive House of Culture. This formed the new composition of the square.
Altogether, the static symmetric arrangement of volumes, which fully displays a new totalitarian organization of society, undermined the baroque composition of the square. Also cut to pieces was the second square, Teatralnaia, with a huge open space, and a park surrounding an amphitheatre of the People’s House. A new main Stalin Avenue became one of the axes crossing the square. On its northern end a repository of ancient manuscripts, the «Matenadaran», was built and at the highest point of the axis a monument was erected: the highest monument to Stalin ever; it could be seen not only from all points of the city, but even from much further away, from the Ararat plain stretching behind it. In full compliance with the ideology of that time, the monument became a main landmark of Yerevan and of the surrounding city.
Thereby, the main direction of the composition of the urban development has been reoriented to the north, to Ararat’s «back». The construction of the new public centre of Yerevan became the final stage in the reorganization of Tamanian’s plan. Along the axis – on both sides of the opened up Bagramian Avenue and away from all the Tamanian’s structures – were erected the buildings of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Armenia, the Supreme Soviets and the Academy of Sciences. The Central Committee built on the hill was forcefully removed from its natural orientation towards Ararat. The importance of the central square, which was a principal element of Tamanian‘s plan, was thus strongly diminished.
The above-listed «corrections» of Tamanian’s urban ideas were finally enshrined in the general plan of Yerevan in 1949. The plan established a peculiar system of totalitarian symbolism expressed in a strict order of urban development: in a symmetry of the ensemble of the Lenin Square with the orator’s platform at the Lenin Monument; in a symmetry of the classical facades; and in the sacramental stories concerning the supreme leader Stalin. The main street signifies the entrance to the city and leads to the Stalin Monument.
At the same time, the name of Tamanian was canonised in Armenia. His architectural language was treated as a carrier of traditional forms and presented as a model for the formation of a socialist realist architecture suitable for other national republics of the USSR. Officially this was expressed in the awarding of the Stalin Prize to Alexander Tamanian in 1941. It is highly likely that the purpose of this, let us say, quite unexpected act, was to pander to the national republics during the difficult period of the beginning of the war.
In the 1960s and at the beginning of twenty-first century, the city planners of Yerevan sought to restore Tamanian’s ideas. However, the lack of due understanding, and the (low) integrity of the efforts undertaken, have only aggravated the gap between the ideas of the great architect and his descendants…
What is expressed by the general plan for Yerevan, the first twentieth-century example of the construction of a new capital for a national state (Brasilia, Islamabad, Astana will be constructed later), under development for almost a century? Falling short of the scale of a national capital possessing all the attributes of sovereign statehood, by the middle of the twentieth century Yerevan has been transformed into a modest, insignificant, provincial and small republican centre within the communist empire. However, the incorrect idea that there is a direct continuity between the two essentially different approaches to the development of Yerevan has become firmly rooted in public and professional opinion.
One cause of the delusion was the aspiration, inherent in both models of the general plan, to create an ideal city. It is obvious that their essence was fundamentally different. At the same time, the purely formal side of the plan – the perimeter-oriented, fastigiated and ordered character of the urban construction – remains similar.
Another argument in favour of a unity of the two architectural models is their language of forms, in both cases based on a combination of classical and national traditions. The «neo-Armenian style» is an artistic innovation of Tamanian, but in the second plan the national idea was dropped as a stylistic principle and only the use of the traditional forms was retained. Tamanian’s concept was put at the service of the socialist-realist method: «national in form and socialist in content». Precisely this false identification of the two different concepts led to the devaluation of Tamanian’s principles over the next decades.
In the 1960s the trend embodied by the Khrushchev Thaw (editors note: the period after Stalin’s death, when repression and cencorship were relaxed) allowed a return to Tamanian’s national city planning. The ideological indulgence that was emblematic of the «thaw» years, and also the rise of national consciousness, were expressed in the extraordinary modernist decisions linked to Tamanian’s national plan. In city-planning terms this corresponds to the creation of the open spaces across Circular Boulevard and Main Avenue, around the Opera House and on an axis of Abovian Street, as well as on the Shaumian Boulevard.
Similar to constructivist buildings, a language of concrete, conveyed by the modernist architecture, contradicted the shapes of the stone facades. Modernist architecture at its best shows an outstanding level of professionalism, and by overcoming existing differences of style organically fits itself into the context of a developing city. However, the Northern Avenue, a key uniting idea of Tamanian’s entire general plan, has become a cascade of squares. This is a new project emerging from the process of detailed downtown planning, and its design contradicts Tamanian’s ideas of spatial composition. It is easy to see here a lack of deep understanding of Tamanian’s national plan and an inability to overcome the influence of the new forms and tendencies of the unified Soviet city planning. Khrushchev’s order to implement industrial methods of construction introduced a new dissonance to the lay out of Yerevan. The multi-storey concrete buildings of so-called infill development began to crash into the remaining old enclaves, breaking the existing integrity of the environment into horizontal and vertical planes.
An obvious return to neo-Stalinist ideas and forms began at the beginning of the 1970s. One symbol of such return was the renewal of work on the main city space. The ensemble of the central square was a spot where, at all stages of the development process, city planners intended to denote the ideological priorities of time. A three level construction was erected on a transversal axis over the House of Culture to become a new landmark in the square’s architectural ensemble. This conceptual path leading to totalitarian design had a crucial significance for further architectural development in Armenia.
In the period of the independent Third Republic the development of the city began to take a paradoxical path. Having restored the state’s independence, and having had an opportunity to develop a national architecture free from the senseless canons of Soviet ideology, city planning and architecture became a hostage to its own contradictory principles. Combinations of totalitarian forms with the 1960s–70s method of infill development have contributed yet further to the destruction of Tamanian’s model. The selection of Stalinist forms and principles was the outcome of this apparent conservatism. The economic and political instability caused by the transport blockade and constant military tension on the country’s borders, as well as the fragility of the modernist architecture, which almost entirely collapsed in the wake of the 1988 Spitak earthquake, has led to a perception of Stalinist architecture as expressing a concept of stability (relatively small constructions of the Stalinist period suffered far less damage). In turn, the methods of infill development corresponded to the growing trend towards the commercialisation of city space. It literally had destructive consequences for the city structure.
A quintessence of the contradictory, amateurish approaches to city development was a widening of the Northern Avenue undertaken during the early 2000s. Predominantly small scale, hypertrophied neo-Stalinist buildings that violate the canons of classical form filled up the avenue.
Over the last two decades the unsystematic urban development and demolition of valuable buildings have resulted in incommensurably greater damage to the general plan of Yerevan than anything from the first six decades of the post-Tamanianian period. The city has lost the harmony of integrated solutions.
Thus, nearly one hundred years later after the beginning of the national project of the new capital city Yerevan, only the Cascade can be said to represent an intelligent expression of Tamanian’s spatial idea of openness to Ararat. However, any ideal city will appear, to a greater or lesser extend, [only] as a myth. Even more so if two contradictory ideological systems serve as its foundation.
It is obvious that totalitarianism and the inability to overcome its consequences became the main reason for the deconstruction of the entire general plan. Only a few remaining traces and fragments of construction allow us to hold in mind the ideal picture of the twelfth Armenian capital that was raised in the imagination of its creator Alexander Tamanian. They also call to mind the words of his contemporary, the poet Yeghishe Charents: «He probably has seen the solar city.»