Yerevan, Armenia
Dec 4, 2025
The wood around the door’s hinges is rotting. The balcony above it leans forward like it’s thinking about collapsing. I’m in Kond, the last surviving shard of old Yerevan, where houses brace against each other like tired wrestlers, and narrow passages twist in directions that make no architectural sense. Vines claim whatever they can. A spring gurgles in a corner where people still stop to talk.
Some walls are black tuff. Others are Soviet concrete patched together into accidental pop-art. It shouldn’t work, but it does not beautifully, but honestly.
You can get lost in the lanes without trying. And every so often a gap opens and you catch a view of glass towers, cranes, pink tufa facades, a reminder that another city is rising alongside this one. Down in Kond, everything feels precarious. Not in the “romantic ruin” way. In the structurally compromised way.
Many who live here descend from Western Armenian, genocide survivors who arrived after 1915. They stayed through the Soviet collapse, through independence, through wars that kept rewriting their sense of where “home” was. A retired sculptor told me: “We had several chances to leave Kond. We stayed.” Tenacity as architecture.
And conditions aren’t good. A former library and pharmacy now stands hollowed out, used as a dumping ground. People talk about neglect, broken roads, promises that never land.
But they’re here. They stay.
The Certainty Trap
Later, in Yerevan’s small galleries and studios, the question became unavoidable: How do you design a life when the ground beneath you keeps shifting?
An artist told me she stopped planning after 2020. Not metaphorically, literally.
The war over Artsakh redrew borders overnight. People who knew what country they lived in woke up wrong. “How do you plan,” she asked, “when you don’t even know if your city will be the same in six months?”
What I heard wasn’t drama, it was the collapse of a psychological foundation: the basic sense of place required to imagine a future.
And it exposed something in me: I behave as if certainty is a form of safety. As if my routines and timelines can out-run unpredictability.
As if more optimisation equals more control. It’s fiction. Convincing fiction, but fiction nonetheless.
Yerevan makes this explicit. Politics unstable. Economy uncertain. History unresolved. The ground literal, political, existential is never fully solid. And yet, people create. Artists work. Life happens. Not in spite of uncertainty, but from inside it.
So maybe the question isn’t how to eliminate uncertainty. Maybe it’s: How do you build when all you ever have is partial information and no guarantees?
Designing From the Wound
A line from Simone de Beauvoir surfaced in my mind:
“Freedom doesn’t exist despite our constraints. It exists within them.”
Yerevan forced this into clarity. People aren’t waiting for the situation to stabilise before acting. They build from the wound itself, from compressed timelines, from instability, from the knowledge that tomorrow is not a given.
This isn’t romanticisation.
It’s an inversion.
In the West, we behave as if we need clean conditions before making decisions. We’re forever preparing the runway. Forever “getting ready. But the conditions we envisage never fully arrive. And Yerevan exposes that fantasy for what it is: a delay tactic dressed as prudence. Freedom isn’t the absence of constraint.
It’s the ability to act honestly from the position you’re already in with the imperfect information you have knowing it may not hold.
Infrastructure of Intimacy
The Institute of Contemporary Art sits inside an old villa with a garden. I spent an afternoon there watching people move between studios and the kitchen. It felt like a prototype for a different kind of institution.
Not a museum.
Not an academy.
Something in-between: precise, human-scale, responsive.
ICA runs critical studies programs, residencies, cross-functional “labs” where education, production, and research blur. The organising principle isn’t ambition or permanence. It’s not-knowing together and working anyway.
The intimacy isn’t a limitation. It’s the infrastructure.Build for certainty, and you become rigid. Build for ambiguity, and the structure moves with the ground. To a Western observer trained to equate scale with seriousness, this might look minor or conceptual. But that misses the point. This work has gravity precisely because it’s grounded in the real constraints of life here, political, economic, psychic.
Crisis removes the decoration. What’s left is honesty.
Return to Kond
On my last day, I walked back to Kond. Same rotting door. Same balcony threatening to give way. Nothing repaired. Nothing resolved.
But it reads differently now.
The balcony isn’t a symbol of decline.
It’s a reminder: this might not hold — and life continues underneath it anyway.
People drink coffee under it without fear or defiance. They’ve simply stopped waiting for conditions to become perfect before living.
Presence is enough.Showing up is enough.
Yerevan made something obvious: You can’t build on imagined ground. And certainty is imagined ground, always has been.The ground is moving. It always was. The question was never how to make it stop.
The question is:
What do you build once you accept that this is the ground?
