PROJECT DETAILS

Spartak Khachikyan / Hrachik Poghosyan / Artur Tarkhanyan: Cinema Rossiya, 1968D–1975

  • Yerevan, Armenia, Show on map
  • #CUL #Eastern Europe
  • The building features a cantilevered waffle slab structure similar to Kenzo Tange's Kagawa Prefectural Gymnasium. However here it is being utilized twice to create a wing-like effect.

    Constructed between 1968 and 1975, the Rossiya Cinema was the largest cinema in Armenia, accommodating 2500 visitors. The two main architectural structures correspond to each halls respectively: green and red. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the cinema was abandoned, and then in the 1990s, became a commercial and shopping centre. Nevertheless, it is one of the few brutalist gems that still stands up in the city.

  • In the middle of the movement of the people and the cars, Cinema Rossiya remains still, solid, grounded. Contrasting the surrounding visual pollution, the construction seems to have landed, from another era. To some, it reminds of a Modernist spaceship. To others, the two peaks of Mount Ararat. But to the eyes of who knows the history, two concrete structures that collide and expand to the sky, like an architectural arrow that projects the Soviet utopia to the future. Inside in the two halls, emptiness and darkness reign the space. Nothing is left from the red and green halls, as the colored seats have been stripped. It is only the mathematical patterns that extend in the ceiling that add a little brush of color to the atmosphere. In the central hall, the monochrome of the concrete turns into color: geometric vitraux light the interior. And it is in the silence of the overwhelm that one looks up, to the sublime colorful sunbeam, and experiences the feel of being, utopically, in a Modernist cathedral.

    Special thanks to Mané Tatoulian