The Swallow Fortress: making a memorial

Monuments are an important part of the city’s urban morphology and of a people’s cultural identity. Monuments are symbolic buildings: they are a means of representation and are open to interpretation. They stand for something but are at the same time something in and of themselves. Memorial monument are especially there to provoke emotions by their presence, which then raise personal memories that resonate between the people, bringing them all to the same state of mind, uniting them.

Not too far from the busy capital city’s downtown, on the west bank of river Hrazdan, perched on a hill overlooking Yerevan, stands the Swallow Fortress crowned by a monument stretching over 4500 sqm, built in 1965 for the commemoration of the Armenian Genocide. The building was opened to the public in 1967. After a long debate stretching about 15 years about the possibility of building this monument in a soviet country and debating the candidates’ proposals for the monument, finally young architects Arthur Tarkhanyan and Sashur Kalashyan were chosen to implement their proposal.

Through many funding difficulties and scarcity of materials (mainly of big chunks of basalt stone) and even though there was no patent yet for it to be legal, the construction began without any changes of the project’s initial scale and design sustained only by the willfulness of the two young architects who refused to succumb to any difficulty. As the builders and architects worked together on the illegal site, they kept repeating: “We are building the graves of our grandparents.” Two thirds of the Armenian population had been systematically massacred, drowned, burned… None of them received a proper burial. Crowds of students and professors would come to the construction site to aid. Clearly, the people needed this monument and they worked together to make it happen.

During the excavations for the construction, there were found urns from the Urartian era, pointing out that the location that the architects had chosen to erect the monument was already an ancient cemetery. The mood on site became even graver if it ever could have.

Before the monument at the Swallow Fortress, the people went to the cemetery to seek Gomidas, a well known priest and artist (musicologist, composer, singer, choirmaster) who developed a severe case of post-traumatic stress disorder after witnessing atrocities done to his people. Every year, for 50 years, the Armenians silently flocked to his grave seeking a place to mourn the big wound left in them. The memorial would be built 50 years after the massive massacres took place. Ever since, during the commemoration of the genocide on April 24th, the masses that march up hill towards the monument, pass through the basalt pillars and place their flowers around the eternal fire and continue down hill.

No ornaments disturb the blank surface of the 12 slanting basalt pillars representing the 12 lost Armenian provinces. This blankness stresses the gravity of what the pillars represent. At their center burns the eternal fire in memory of the 1 and a half million who perished. Not far from them stands the memorial column, sectioned into two columns measuring 50 meters in height, darting towards the sky. At first it was clad by charcoal-ed stainless steel to mimic stone but this was later dismantled and replaced by black granite in the 1970s. The structure was strong enough to withstand the earthquake that hit Armenia in 1988. As for the proportions of the pillars and column, they are based on the same proportional scales used for planing Armenian churches.The interpretation of these structures is left to what they whisper to the visitors’ souls.

reference: Rouzan Khachanyan

FaceLifting

There’s a strange thing that happens to buildings sometimes… it happens to them through their owners after a long time has passed. They seem to fall out of fashion? Become boring? Dull? Therefore, the good owner decides that something new must be brought in to make this building more popular, so that, of course, people are more interested in the owner’s business through this building’s bright new style. Well… Isn’t the building that is housing the business also the face of that business? But if the owner finds the building dull then everyone else must be seeing the face of the business dull. So! A face-lift must be in order! A great change of wardrobe! Maybe a new stylized pimping up to be right back in fashion? The unfortunate side of this whole sad story is that the owners are sometimes unaware that some buildings they own happen to be classics which evidently means that they can never fall out of fashion: classic! It is sad that the owner is unaware that the facelift, the new stylized wardrobe for their building will only deteriorate its value as a classic. But of course, the building has been there for so long that it’s become dull! We all agree to that: the problem doesn’t seem to be resolved. Funny that it is absolutely true that the building has become dull but for different reasons than that which seem to be preoccupying the owners. Over the years layers of dust and dirt from the city have been covering the building’s facade. The building has been recoiling under these layers blending slowly into the monotonous colors of the city. All that was really needed to do to avoid this was to upkeep it and restore it so the dust and dirt of the city wouldn’t cover its glory to such an extent that over time even the owner wouldn’t be able to recognize the true value of their building. It is sad when people don’t upkeep their buildings and renovate them on regular basis to prolong the building’s lifespan as means of keeping their good face to the public. The ideal way is to have a proper architect raise your building and then to upkeep it because you know that the building will not loose value since it’s well designed. When you own a well designed building, you do not go to slumber and wait for the building to cave in and then find the cheapest way to fix your problems. If the well designed building represents your business, how can you decide to give it a facelift after decades? Is it even real that these business owners really care about the face of their business along the run? Here is a link protesting about one such sad story between a classic building by Alvar Alto on Hamra street in Beirut and its owners.

Pet Architecture – Atelier Bow-Wow

 

War and Architecture – Lebbeus Woods

  

AR[chi]T[ecture]…?

When you lay on your back during pitch black nights, you watch the skies and feel overwhelmed by twinkling beauty and find yourself thinking: this is pure art. When you’re in a beautiful forest and basking in the drops of sunlight reflected in green and shadowed in brown magic, you find yourself thinking: this is pure art. It is no surprise that many philosophers have claimed that nature and art are intrinsically related. But sometimes, when you are in a building and you are overwhelmed by the scale and detail of its architecture, you find yourself thinking again: this is pure art. Art is a medium that has as sole purpose to communicate a statement directly to our spirits, hence the holiness it emanates. The reality of things is that there is a fundamental problem in equating architecture (or design) with art just like there would be a fundamental problem in equating nature with art! Ask yourself, is a city an over scaled work of art populated by works of art or is it a space populated by us? Nevertheless, we do experience art in spaces from time to time. That is because architecture (or design) can communicate a statement as part of its existence, however unlike art that is not its raison d’être; similarly making a statement is not the raison d’être of nature. Architecture has many layers that have to be harmonized between each other and from this harmony sometimes stems that holy feeling we attribute to art. That’s what we feel in nature as well: unfathomable harmony. Even if architecture does convey a strong statement, it is still not art because first and foremost, it is architecture. Therefore, whenever you encounter an architect expressing a need to make an artwork instead of a need to make architecture, you should be very weary: in order to achieve their goal of creating a statement, these architects had to dismiss many of the layers that fundamentally define architecture and have meddled with that very fragile harmonious structure that makes architecture what it is. Their architectural work might be a wonderful artefact, but, they fail to deliver architecture.

Bombay Sapphire Distillery – Heatherwick Studio