We envision the Armenian American Museum as a center at home in its environment and an environment onto itself. The museum’s location, in a basin surrounded by mountains, recalls the siting of the Armenian capital of Yerevan and the ringed design of its city center. Our horizontal design combines interwoven pavilions of varying heights, plazas, gardens and vistas under a floating, bowl-shaped canopy, erasing all boundaries between structure and landscape.The varying volumes on the museum’s plaza level turn the building into both an object and place. Each visitor negotiates the constellation of spaces differently, devising individual paths through the shifting exhibitions and gathering areas. Transparent, glass-walled community rooms coexist with opaque galleries and open-air lobbies. Shafts of light filter through the cut-outs in the roof, connecting the natural environment with the built one, and gardens grow both under the canopy and along pathways that stretch across the grounds.The striking, angled memorial column rising from the plaza level through the roof symbolizes the Armenian people’s history, their resilience through tragedy and their thriving community in the United States. A turned stairway winds up to the rooftop peace garden, a calm, contemplative space with wide-open views of the Verdugo Mountains.
