‘I Understood that he Is entrusted to serve some great business undertaking’: Armenian architects reshaping the Ottoman east in the Hamidian era (1876–1909)
Ottoman urban change in the nineteenth century has been associated with
two ‘top down’ factors: firstly European influence (in the form of foreign
architects, new building types, planning methods, civic bodies, etc.) and
secondly, the state’s implementation of reforms centralising the supervision
of building works. This paper looks to the cities of the Ottoman east
to stress the agency of Armenian architects over local building activities.
These architects not only provided a service at a time when the state was
incapacitated, but they reformulated the urban image in these locations so
that it was, at once, modern (conceived in terms of a European or Russian
metropolitan model), local, and Ottoman
