Monument to Alexander Tamanyan, Soviet-era monument in Kentron District, Armenia
The Monument to Alexander Tamanyan is a basalt and granite sculpture in the Kentron district of Yerevan, showing the architect in bronze bent over a working table with his drawings. The stone base carries a carved representation of his city plan along with text inscriptions worked into the composition, and the whole structure stands about 3 meters (10 ft) tall.
Tamanyan drew up the first master plan for Yerevan in the 1920s, giving the city its grid of wide avenues and ring roads that still frame its layout today. The monument was erected later to mark his contribution, and it stands near the Cascade, a complex that continued to develop along the lines he originally envisioned.
The monument shows Tamanyan bent over his drawings, as if still at work on the city spread out around him. Many residents of Yerevan think of him as the person who gave the city its shape, and the monument sits right at the edge of the Cascade, one of his most recognizable projects.
The monument stands at the corner of Tamanyan and Moskovyan Streets, close to the Cascade steps, and is easy to reach on foot from the city center. It sits in an open area with no barriers, so you can walk around it from any direction and get a close look at the carved details on the base.
A poem by Yeghishe Charents is carved into the granite platform, invoking the image of a sunny city in a few lines of verse. This combination of architecture and poetry on a single monument is rare in Yerevan and gives the work a dimension that goes beyond a simple tribute to a public figure.
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