Study

English

Rostom Voskanian: The Legacy of an Architect

By Talinn Grigor, Professor of Art History

of an Architect

Rostom Voskanian’s path was decided upon graduation from Tehran University in 1959.

He was handpicked as the fifth recipient of the prestigious state-scholarship to continue his architectural studies in Paris.  After four years at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, he returned to Tehran University in 1964  as an assistant professor in the studio of the well-known architect Hushang Seyhun.  Within ten years at the department,  he became the chair and directed the school of architecture from 1975  to the closing of the university in 1980.  During this period Voskanian was prolific, with many art exhibitions,  architectural commissions, and  academic undertakings. On a sabbatical leave at the University of Pennsylvania in 1974, he visited world-renowned architect Louis Kahn’s office, whom he must have met in 1970.  Kahn’s humane monumentality, successful mix of  traditional materials with concrete, and regionalist designs spoke to Voskanian’s own principles.  At the time, he could not have known that the last two decades of his creative life would be spent not too far from Kahn’s masterpiece.  Voskanian’s buildings in the ‘60s, including the Armenian Club and the Weekend House in Tehran as well as    the Armenian Kindergarten in Tabriz, were early examples  of regionalist modernism in Iran.  Different local materials were brought  together to rethink form and function.  Like Kahn, a deep understanding and respect for history, distinguished Voskanian from other modernists, who took time away from building to preserve historical monuments. The renovation of Saint Thaddeus monastery  and the documentation of Saint Sarkis church were seminal expressions of his commitment to history.  

of a Stadium

Voskanian undertook his largest commission in 1971 for the Ararat Armenian Cultural Organization:

a 10,000 seat athletic stadium in northern Tehran.  Some 2-hectare land, surrounding the 17^th-century Vanak cemetery, was gifted to the Armenian community by Mohammad Reza Shah.  A six-member committee was formed to manage the realization of this massive project.  The entire community endorsed and financed its construction.  This was a communal mega-project that was to belong to the people.    Voskanian had been a longtime  member of Ararat organization.    That he was one of the leading architects of his time rendered his hiring an obvious choice. But there was something else at play here.Voskanian was a man of integrity, a people’s architect and the very spirit of the project demanded such an artist.

A topographically difficult terrain with a difference in elevation of 26 meters, Voskanian managed to turn it into a series of highly functional and spatially effective agglomeration,  arranged around the soccer field. Each space maintained its stylistic individuality and spatial independence.  The modernist design went hand in hand with the choice of the material and function: rough concrete, brick, and glass.    The project’s implication for the Armenian community not only in Tehran, but all around Asia was vast:  a large open-air stadium, several indoor and outdoor sports halls,  tennis courts, offices, classrooms, meeting halls, storage rooms, locker rooms, camping areas, parking amenities, and a world-class swimming facility. In the following years, the stadium was used for significant community  and national events as a result of its successful spatial configuration, solid construction, and forward-looking engineering. The complex was handed over to the Executive Board of Ararat in late 1976.

of a Masterpiece

Voskanian’s Holy Cross Chapel on the southeastern corner of the complex was an addition after the Iranian Revolution of 1979, which certainly encapsulates, not only Voskanian’s artistic brilliance, but also his lifelong commitment to both the people but also to history and modernity.  Although initially the complex was designed and used as a secular space, Ararat’s governing committee judged it best in the early 1980s to erect an Armenian Apostolic chapel on the grounds so as to disable the state confiscation of the stadium.

He proposed a reinterpretation in poured concrete of the best examples of medieval Armenian churches, transformed into an interwoven system of supports, openings, and suspensions.  While remaining true to the symmetric and central floor plan of medieval domed churches, such as Saint Hripsimeh, Voskanian carved out a form that boldly incarnates the elevation and section of traditional churches into an allegorical representation of  the Christian cross. An architecture of sculpture or a sculpted architecture?

Voskanian avant-garde design was progressive and revolutionary. Finding the proposal, as it were, “too modern and unorthodox,” the Armenian prelate instead asked for the imitation of a 19^th-century church in Antilias, Lebanon.  “Your holiness,” Voskanian had said, “I am either building this or nothing at all.” A man of principles, of integrity. A man of the people.  He tirelessly supervised the complex construction of the chapel as he had done the stadium itself in the following two years.  Two years, despite shortage of material,  unexpected inspections, and construction difficulties,  Voskanian spend his days next to his workers.  On the site; with his men. In September 1987, the Holy Cross was ordained. “I never approached it as a political work,” he said in 2001.  “That which has been built, is a reality that remains; people change their political views with no influence on my art. For me, the chapel was very important.”  “You mean, religiously?” I asked him. “No, not at all. I am not a believer, but I have faith. I believe in the people, in its culture. One has to create the space of spirituality.”   

And, I ask you, what did he ask of the people to whom he dedicated a life? What did he ask of us? Nothing much.  Perhaps to look, to see, to touch the sublime tucked in the layers of his surfaces, of his forms. And have we?  Have we understood the place of Voskanian’s art in the canon of modernism?  Have we appreciated the merit of his work in the history of Armenian art?  Have we recognized the role his architecture has played in the formation of our collective identity?

of a Legacy

Voskanian left behind a legacy and a tradition in Irano-Armenian modernism when he left Tehran in 1988. By so doing, he also left behind his architectural practice. Moving to Southern California, he showed an exceptional ability to adopt. With his Beaux-Arts training, he dropped the ruler and picked up the brush. In the following two and a half decades, he restlessly produced artworks in his home-studio in Glendale California, which resulted in a series of successful exhibitions in North Amrica.

Yet at the core, Voskanian remained an architect. His chapel embodies the most superb example of contemporary architecture.  It is a brilliant answer to architecture’s own modernity, to Corbu, Mies, Gropius, and Kahn. The chapel is not just Voskanian’s masterpiece. The chapel is a masterpiece. With the remarkable pouring of concrete, with its quadrupling of design, with its mutation from sculpture to architecture,    with its protruding three-dimensional crosses, and with its interior low reliefs it is an answer: what is modernism?   

The chapel also belongs to the rich repertoire of the Armenian tradition. His is a legacy that wills the avant-garde by the persistence of tradition. Therein hides his work’s genius: brilliant manifestation of Voskanian’s intellectual force, his artistic gift, and his unique instinct to reveal to us the ancient principles in a language that is ours.

That both King Gagik’s cathedral on the Akhtamar island and Voskanian’s chapel on the grounds of Ararat stadium are named Holy Cross is prophetic.  Both stand proud as representative masterworks of Armenian architecture, one of the Middle Ages and the other of the modern era. Gagik’s exquisite high reliefs on the surface of Holy Cross are echoed in the equally exquisite minimalism of the poured concrete of Voskanian’s Holy Cross. One could touch both surfaces and grasp the essence of their artistic spirit. Both speak so sincerely of their Zeitgeist, of their place, of their time, of their artistic foresight. Visionary and deeply true.

To have lost one’s home wherein one had made a name, yet to continue to create original, thought-provoking, and critical works of art is a mark of an exceptional mind, a pure heart, and a sincere artist. Voskanian was he. To have lost that artist to cancer is the loss of not one but two nations, if not all the world’s artistic communities. Not one but two nations mourn today. One of unmatched talent, one of integrity and honor, one who believed in the peoples’ modernity and with his creation, became one with it. May he rest in peace as his work endures onto eternity.