Ghost city

With a population of 149,000 people, Gyumri is the second biggest city in Armenia but also famously suffered from a terrible earthquake that took place in 1988. In order to help those who had been made homeless, the Soviet Government decided to build a new residential area called Mush. It is a fairly large area next to the city. Construction was started in 1989 but was never finished. Mush is very near the city centre. You only have to travel ten minutes from the centre and you find yourself in this dreadful “wilderness” of dead buildings. In Mush the ghostly spectre of Modernism is ever present. It is a spectre because the modernist construction was never finished. In Armenia, Modernism will never completely go away, because it never fully arrived. Residential buildings and areas were increasingly pushed out to the suburbs and outskirts of cities and forgotten. To this day they are paid little or no attention. They have been left at mercy of time and weather and some day they will fade away. But before they do so, they stand as a silent reminder of certain truths. When one stands in the centre of Mush and observes the buildings that have failed to fulfill their function one can’t stop thinking of the bright future that was intended for them and the utopian aura that these buildings carry within themselves.