Careful guidelines creating quality
By devising careful guidelines for each development plot, the richness of the
variety of Armenian building can be condensed down into close proximity. We
will mandate harmony.
In this way, each Embassy can display, to the visitors to Dalma, the qualities
of its home region or Province or town or city, displaying its attractions, arts,
manufactures and specialties.
Each Embassy might incorporate a unique commercial attribute. It may be a
boutique hotel in regional style, or restaurant, or workshop or club or retail outlet
– anything compatible with the overall masterplan.
In this way, something can be made which should aim to be both a tourism magnet,
and a locus of mixed-use urban living for Yerevan citizens themselves.
Urban design concepts for Dalma village Urban Form and Village Form – a note
We have proposed a narrative, walking layout, using the familiar vocabulary
of gateways and thresholds, character areas, pathways and alignments, views
and vistas, landmarks. We define the edges of places with ‘streetwall controls’,
stipulating heights, style, materials and suchlike. We define a Landscape
Framework, with broad areas of hard and soft landscaping, and water features.
We want to create a rich variety of spaces and experiences, leading visitors on to
explore, making multiple visits.
This is a Concept Plan, although a tentative one. We present it in the form of a
pictorial Mass Plan. We are trying to define characterful places. Normally, these
guidelines would be passed on to architects, but here they will be used more
flexibly, to bring together compositions of rebuilt and facsimile projects, as these
are identified.
We present an Opportunities and Constraints Plan; an Urban Design Concepts
plan; a Highways and access plan; a Pedestrian Narrative plan; a Land Use plan
showing proposed plots; a Heights and data plan. City blocks and plots are usually approximately rectangular shapes, or
geometries from which rectangles can be excavated efficiently. They are
formal, regular, ordered. This need not be repressive, and a great deal of
variety can be extracted from simple rectangular plots. We see this form in
Armenian townscape, even in villages. It is remarkably regular and proper,
and this allows for even modest buildings to have regular, well-made facades
and plans. How then, in our facsimile townscape, to introduce a picturesque
variability? Well, with restraint, and judgement. We have to give this place a
plausible informality.
Our site slopes falling about 27m over 350m, or one in thirteen, equivalent
to about seven floors overall.This will allow us to introduce steps and levels,
overviews and long views out. The approximately orthogonal plan is aligned,
softly, on Ararat, cloudlike but infinitely solid.
What we show now, is only an early idea, a sense of the emotional play,
since the actuality will depend on the buildings selected to relocate and/or
reproduce here.
9_ DALMA VILLAGE_ A narrative of our study and design work to date