Daylight, Underground

Yerevan’s metro is one line and a handful of stations, and the city mostly moves by minibus. But it was built when a Soviet metro station was expected to be a piece of architecture with an argument in it, and this one’s argument is about light.

Everywhere else in the world, going underground means giving up the sky at the top of the stairs. Here somebody decided not to accept that. So the station doesn’t surface as a hole in the pavement; it surfaces as a shell — a long ribbed vault that breaks out of the ground at an angle, reading much more like something rising than something dug, and runs back down into the earth alongside a ramp held between two heavy concrete walls. The whole object is a light pipe. Daylight goes in at the top and keeps going down.

I came past at eleven at night, which is exactly the wrong time to see what it’s for and exactly the right time to see it as a thing. Lit from outside, the ribs come at you one after another all the way up the curve, the stone of the retaining walls goes the colour of a lamp, and behind it the blocks stand around with their windows on. Nobody about. A trail across the sky.

Somebody spent real concrete on the idea that people going to work underground shouldn’t have to give up the sun to do it.

That is a very particular kind of optimism, and it is the same optimism as everything else on this trip — the mirror telescope on the mountain, the resort that was never finished, the airport with a control tower like a flying saucer. Somebody was sure enough about the future to pour it.

The difference is that this one is still open, still running, and still doing exactly what it was built to do. In this journal, that’s the rare outcome.