Stopped at the Frame

I went to Sevan because of family. My grandfather’s people were from this shore — Armenians, from the lake — and when I put the Armenian trip together I built a day around standing here, the day after the plane and the telescope. I expected water and hills and something quiet to think about. I got that. I also got the other thing.

The lake first, because it earns it. Sevan sits at nineteen hundred metres, and you notice the altitude in the light before you notice it in your legs — thin, hard, very clear. It’s enormous; the far shore goes to haze. In August the water turns a turquoise that looks like it was done to the photograph afterwards, and bare gold hills come all the way down to meet it. Nothing about it is subtle.

And then a few hundred metres back from the water there is the other thing, and it is not a building, it’s a complex. Two towers of nine or ten storeys standing apart on open grass, a third behind them. A low block a hundred metres long running toward the shore on a colonnade, another wing beside it. And a slab of a building made from precast concrete rings stacked in a grid, so its entire face is a wall of circles — from above it looks less built than loaded.

What holds all of it together is the material. Every pier, every fin, every edge is faced in tuff, the pink-orange volcanic stone this country builds everything out of — churches, apartment blocks, half of Yerevan — laid over a raw concrete frame. At this scale, with the evening sun on it, the whole complex glows. It is a beautiful thing. It is also a monstrous one. Both of those are true from the same place in the grass.

Never opened

It doesn’t read as a hotel that closed. It reads as one that never started. There is no glazing anywhere and no sign there ever was — no frames, no putty, no broken glass in the grass. The floor slabs are bare, the roofs are bare, the stairs climb up into rooms that were never finished into rooms. Whatever was supposed to happen here stopped somewhere between the frame and the finish, and then decades of weather happened instead.

Inside, that turns out to be the whole point. Every missing window is just an opening, and every opening frames the lake. I walked a full floor of one of them — columns, dust, low sun coming in sideways and lying flat across the concrete — and the view out of every bay was the same impossible turquoise. Rooms that were never sold, holding the exact view they were built to sell.

Somewhere up there is a sheet of metal roofing that never got fixed down. That’s the only sound in the entire complex — wind, working it, on and off. Nothing else moves.

I stayed until the sun went off the towers, on the shore my family came from, in a building nobody has ever slept in.