location: 40.190249004615, 44.52165916929618
architect: Armen Aghalyan
date: 1985
Building No. 9 was constructed for the Yerevan Polytechnic Institute, today the National Polytechnic University of Armenia — one of the key training grounds for architects, engineers, and specialists who shaped Soviet Yerevan and Armenia. Formed in 1933 from two previously established institutes — of construction and of chemical technology — with an initial enrolment of 107 students, the Polytechnic Institute expanded alongside the Armenian republic’s industrial and scientific ambitions. By the mid-1980s, when Building No. 9 was being designed and constructed, the Polytech had around 25,000 students and offered training in 66 specializations, providing Soviet Armenia with professionals required for its industrial, infrastructural, and urban development.
Although the architectural specializations were separated from the Polytech in 1989 into an independent Institute of Architecture and Construction — today the National University of Architecture and Construction of Armenia, or NUACA — the dense fabric of the present-day buildings of both universities still reflects the growth of the Polytechnic Institute in the second half of the twentieth century as a local institutional cluster. This expansion also mirrors the broader academic geography of northeastern central Yerevan, where streets such as Teryan, Koryun, and Nalbandyan formed a dense concentration of educational and scientific institutions, shaping one of the city’s main zones of higher education and research.
Around the Polytech’s main building, constructed by Artashes Mamijanyan in 1953–1963 as a neoclassical volume, a specialized campus-like environment developed along Teryan and Koryun streets. By the 1970s, this central territory had become overcrowded, and a project was proposed to transfer part of the Polytechnic Institute’s future development to Avan, in the northern part of Yerevan, as a way to create a large modern environment for technical education and research. The project, designed by Sarkis Gurzadyan and Karsata Matinyan, remained only partially realized. Building No. 9 on Koryun Street therefore belongs to the final stage of the old central campus rather than to the Avan expansion: it was one of the last major buildings inserted into the historical Polytechnic territory.
By the time Building No. 9 was designed, its architect, Armen Aghalyan, headed the institute’s Faculty of Architecture and Construction, so the commission was closely connected to his own professional and pedagogical environment. Within the dense campus setting, the building stands out immediately because of its façade. Unlike the more restrained academic blocks around it, it is covered with repeating volumetric concrete modules in a four-lobed form, creating a deep ornamental screen.
This visual distinction is not merely decorative. In Yerevan’s hot climate, such concrete screens form sun-protective frames around the windows, functioning as a form of passive environmental control. They break direct sunlight before it reaches the glass and create a shaded buffer around the window openings, reducing overheating inside the building. This was especially important in the Soviet context. In postwar international modernism, smooth glass façades became one of the main signs of technological progress, but they often depended on advanced air-conditioning systems. In the USSR, where such systems were limited, excessive glazing could create practical problems: heat loss in winter and overheating in summer.
This combination of technology and ornament connects Building No. 9 with Aghalyan’s earlier works. In 1972–1981, together with Grigory Grigoryan and sculptor Vage Arutyunyan, he designed the International Telephone Station. Its main volume was covered with a lace-like concrete grid, making the building one of the most recognizable examples of late Soviet modernism in Yerevan. Around the same period, in 1974–1978, Aghalyan and Grigoryan worked on the ArmGIIGIS building, the Republican Center of Geodesy and Cartography on Komitas Avenue. There, too, a modernist composition was combined with relief surfaces and references to Armenian visual culture.
Aghalyan himself explained this language through Armenian medieval heritage. In interviews, he noted that he had travelled across Armenia studying architectural monuments, and that the ornaments of ancient khachkars suggested the possibility of using similar elements not only in stone cladding but also in concrete. Through this approach, concrete was no longer treated solely as a neutral industrial material, but as a medium capable of transferring the sophisticated logic of stone carving into the technologies of late Soviet construction.
Building No. 9 was completed in 1989, at a moment when public attention in Armenia was absorbed by the Karabakh conflict and the aftermath of the Spitak earthquake of 1988. Soon after, the collapse of the Soviet Union interrupted many institutional and archival processes. This likely explains why the construction history of the building remains poorly documented and why a fuller historical account is still difficult to reconstruct.
The building also remained a fragment of a larger unrealized ensemble. It was intended to be perceived together with a high institutional tower, known today as “Citadel,” planned for the corner of Teryan Street. That tower was built only after the collapse of the Soviet Union, in a significantly altered form and with a new function: today it is the Citadel Business Center, roughly half the height originally envisioned by Aghalyan.
At the same time, the building’s reception was complicated from the beginning. Similar concrete screens were widely used in Central Asia, where they responded not only to climate but also to Islamic traditions of patterned shade. In Yerevan, this association led some critics to describe Building No. 9 as “Central Asia in the center of our city” and “not our architecture.” Even the richly carved tuff base, executed in a national idiom by Vage Arutyunyan, did not fully neutralize this perception.
Yet this very ambiguity now makes the building especially revealing. Building No. 9 shows how late Soviet Armenian architecture could move between several registers at once: functional climate response, industrial construction, medieval Armenian references, and postmodern ornament. What was once perceived as alien or excessive can now be understood as part of a broader search for a new architectural language at the end of the Soviet period.
Over time, attitudes toward the building have softened. Its boldness, once a source of criticism, has become one of the reasons it attracts attention today. When the grey concrete lace of the façade was painted white several years ago, many viewers reacted negatively, suggesting that the building had already entered a new stage of public appreciation. Today, Building No. 9 can be read as a campus building where concrete tries to remember stone, and where an educational institution becomes a field for debating form, climate, ornament, and national identity.
Sources and Further Reading
Armen, E. “Архитектура общественных зданий Армении 1960–1970” [Architecture of Public Buildings in Armenia, 1960–1970], in: Arkhitektura SSSR, 1972, no 4, p. 22–27.
Bronovitskaya, Anna; Markus, Elena; Palmin, Yuri; Balyan, Karen. Ереван: архитектура советского модернизма, 1955–1991 [Yerevan: Architecture of Soviet Modernism, 1955–1991]. Moscow, 2026.
text and photos by Elena Lisitsyna