Nikolai Gavrilovich Buniatian

Born Aug. 24 (Sept. 5), 1878 (in some documents birth date given as Sept. 7, 1884), in Tbilisi; died Dec. 13, 1943, in Moscow. A Soviet architect, student of ancient Armenian architecture.

Buniatian graduated from the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts in 1914. Until 1924 he worked in Moscow. He was chief architect of Yerevan from 1924 to 1938, simultaneously teaching in the division of architecture of the engineering department of the University of Yerevan (from 1930 known as the Yerevan Polytechnical Institute). He contributed to the development of urban construction and of new types of residential buildings in the Armenian SSR, where he was the architect for about 70 residential and public buildings. In his work he utilized Russian classical architectural forms (the Hotel Yerevan, 1926), as well as the forms of traditional Armenian architecture (the Agricultural Bank, 1930; the Hotel Sevan, 1939; a residential group on Lenin Prospect, in the late 1930’s—all of these in Yerevan).