One of Yerevan’s Memories has been Levelled to the Ground: Tigran Amiryan

Literary scholar Tigran Amiryan wrote on his Facebook page: “This house on the former Alaverdi Street, now Nairi Street, no longer exists. Two days ago, it was levelled to the ground. My photographs from 2017 and a passage from Andrey Ivanov’s article in our book Firdus: The Memory of a Place are a reminder of its essence.

At the corner of the street, along the straight red line, you would see a modest-sized house with a front made of black tuff, exemplifying all the archetypes of Armenian urban vernacular architecture: a wall of tuff blocks tightly placed together at the entrance, decorative frames around the openings, and a precisely profiled cornice. The master (in the context of vernacular architecture, one could refer to the main builder of the house as a “master” in the medieval sense, not implying a professional architect) successfully integrated the house into the configuration of the street and the area, delicately expressing the main semantic emphases of the facade— the door and the windows. The transition from the house to the sky is emphasized by a modest yet dignified neoclassical cornice, while the relationship between the house and the ground is marked by a coarser but again meticulously crafted base (seemingly basalt). The house has no roof, the door is sealed with a tuff wall, but everything is recoverable. Through this house, modern urban planners and builders— not just in Yerevan— can learn the art of environmental construction.”