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The Calvert Journal has published an article about the remarkable history of Sevan Writers’ Resort in Armenia and its uncertain future. Author Owen Hatherley describes the building as
“a monument to the avant-garde dreams of the 20th century and an icon of Khrushchev Modernism.”

The jurnal recalls accounts by famous writers of Lake Sevan. In his 1933 Journey to Armenia, Osip Mandelstam writes of how he “spent a month enjoying the lake water that stood at a height of 2,000 feet above sea level”, and the monastery that overlooked it, “literally paved with the fiery red slabs of nameless graves”. His wife Nadezhda Mandelstam remembered in her memoirs testing new Zeiss camera lenses on the surrounding landscape, whose bright primary colours created a “naïve painting” effect. Three decades later, Vasily Grossman described the landscape as a “rough stone dish, black and blue and the colour of rust”, within which the lake was “deep blue, and almost boundless”. Simone de Beauvoir, who visited with Sartre, wrote in 1972 of “a pinkish, chaotic desert with a bright blue lake in the middle of it”.

“What brought all these authors here was the Sevan Writers’ Resort, built in the early 1930s by the Writers’ Union of the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic. What none of them wrote about, however, was the story of the building itself (just a “hotel”, for de Beauvoir), a tragic saga encompassing the Soviet avant-garde, Stalinist repressions, the optimism of the Thaw and the slow decline of the post-Soviet years. With the Resort currently holding a group exhibition about its own history, and about to face a full restoration, that story might yet become better known,” the author writes.

It is noted that the Writers’ Resort stands was originally an island in the lake, which became a peninsula when the water level was lowered for irrigation works in the 1930s. On the top of the peninsula’s steep hill is a ninth-century monastery, whose conical churches were made from the same harsh red and brown rocks as the landscape around. But the craggy aesthetic of the monastery didn’t influence architects Gevorg Kochar and Mikael Mazmanyan when they were commissioned to design a Writers Resort here in 1932.

“The Writers’ Resort is laconic, rationalist and calm: four storeys, built into the lower part of the peninsula, with curved balconies and a glazed stair-tower to offer a view over as much of the lake as possible. In 1937, not very long after the Resort hosted its first guests, Kochar and Mazmanyan were arrested and deported to the Arctic Circle, about as far from Lake Sevan as it’s possible to imagine. They would spend 15 years in Norilsk before they were “rehabilitated” after the death of Stalin.”

In the early 60s, after his return to Armenia, Kochar was commissioned to design a new café wing for the Resort he’d designed 30 years earlier. Kochar actually got to build an avant-garde dream project. A long, curved glass volume is cantilevered right out above the rocks overlooking the lake, so far that you could park trucks underneath it, with the whole construction balanced on one thick concrete leg. It’s a genuinely spectacular vindication of the ideas about “local” modernism that Kochar and Mazmanyan had advanced in the 20s: completely integrated into its site, a sentry nestled above the rocks, allowing café customers panoramic views of the lake and the mountains. It has no sentimentality towards the monastery or the historic architecture around, preferring instead a futurist aesthetic suited to a country that was then sending people into space. “In the last few years — the building has become an oft-photographed emblem of the modernism of the Khrushchev Thaw, here given particular poignancy because it was the creation of one of Stalin’s victims, coming back to complete the unfinished business of the 1920s,” reads the article.

The building is dilapidated today, writes the author, ringed by caravans, huts, some dodgy-looking new hotels and a market in front of the steps leading up to the monastery. But it still takes guests, and the cafe serves trout fished from the lake, described by Simone de Beauvoir as “delicious”, which seemed to me an understatement.

“It all does feel like a rare successful Soviet utopian project; the Resort is not luxurious or opulent, but sitting on the curved terraces of the 1932 building, precisely calculated to parallel the sudden swoop of the café, with the red and green of the bushes on the shore, the snow-capped black crags in the near distance and the sun sparkling on the water, this is some sort of vision of paradise.

Reflecting on the current renovation plans, Owen Hatherley reminds of the grant as part of the Getty Foundation’s “Keeping it Modern” programme aimed at launching investigation into the building’s fabric and possible future use by a research team from Yerevan, along with international experts on Soviet Modernism and architects from Helsinki’s Alvar Aalto Foundation.

The source quotes architect Sarhat Petrosyan saying the results need to be “self-sustaining,” so that the renovation can pay for itself and the building not fall once again into neglect and dilapidation. There will be a conference centre and a high-end restaurant

“If you go to Sevan now, before these plans are put in place, you’ll find something entirely unique: a cheap hostel on a mountain lake, a modern art gallery and a living museum of Soviet tragedy and achievement unlike any other,” concludes the author.