The Cascade Gardens Cultural Center

The most prominent civic feature of the city center of Yerevan, Armenia is the Cascade, a monumental, 300-meter-high terraced structure with gardens, fountains, and continuous stairs on its exterior and galleries, shops, and public escalators inside. Sheathed in white travertine, the Cascade is a well-used public amenity for Yerevan as well as a component of urban pedestrian circulation, connecting the downtown Kentron district with the neighborhoods on the hills above. However, the Cascade was never finished; construction began in the 1970s but was suspended during the turmoil of the 1980s, leaving the upper third of the structure unfinished. In the late 2000s, David Hotson_Architect proposed a design for a museum complex to fill the hole at the top of the Cascade; this complex, the Cafesjian Center for the Arts, began construction but was placed on hold in 2009 following the global financial crisis. At a moment when consensus is growing to finally complete the Cascade, the “Cascade Gardens Cultural Center" proposal represents the further development of these existing plans for a modern Yerevan in the midst of great transformation.

The fundamental architectural operation is to extend the sloping plane of the existing Cascade steps upward, forming an inclined datum that reaches the monumental terrace at the top of the hill. The surface of this datum is articulated as a public garden, continuing the steps from the existing Cascade and offering Yerevan’s residents a variety of protected spaces for free civic use. Verdant enclosures of native flowers, shrubs, and orchard trees, interspersed with fountains and benches carved from local tufa stone, echo the material language of Yerevan's characteristic trellis gardens, bowers, squares, and courtyards.

The public facilities of the cultural center are concentrated below the new datum, respecting the existing character of Yerevan's downtown skyline and preserving sightlines up from Tamanyan Park at the bottom and down from the monument terrace at the top. Key to the proposal is a continuous network of publicly accessible escalators, completing the pedestrian route to the top of the hill and carrying visitors through a shifting sequence of dramatic views—both interior, through the nested volumes and program spaces of the Cultural Center, and exterior, framing Yerevan's symbolic and cultural landmarks.

Courtyards and terraces bring light down into gallery spaces and offer peaceful, gardened spaces for cafes, restaurants, outdoor film screenings and performances, and informal social gatherings both formal and informal. Travertine and tufa finishes place the new architectural forms in the lineage of the historical Cascade; and thick plantings of native trees fill in the barren ground currently surrounding the complex, creating a green corridor connecting to Victory Park, which currently overlooks downtown Yerevan.

Rather than a transformation, Cascade Gardens represents an extension of the vibrant cultural space the citizens of Yerevan have already created on the Cascade itself; a refined place for everyday recreation and civic life as well as dramatic encounters with a familiar city viewed through striking new architectural frames. In this union of tradition and change, the Cascade Gardens Cultural Center reflects a Yerevan, and an Armenia, poised at the moment of transition between a Soviet past and a global future filled with both challenge and great promise.