This article documents the Parisian education of two Armenian-Ottoman architects
in Paris in the middle of the nineteenth century. Following Nigogos and Serkis
Balyan to the Collège Sainte-Barbe, the École Centrale and the École des Beaux-Arts,
it traces aspects of the education they were exposed to there. The article then moves
on to investigate where the impact of this education can be seen in the specific architectural
works of these individuals. Showing how the architects manipulated their
Parisian education to express an Ottoman renaissance, the article stresses how these
Ottoman subjects were not creating imitative works but were creative actors in their
own right, engaging in an original way with what they had learned, and pragmatically
refashioning it for their particular setting
