Last Look

This is the last frame of the trip. Four days of Soviet Armenia — an airliner up on a cliff, a mirror telescope on a mountain, a resort nobody ever slept in — and then you go to the airport to leave, and the airport turns out to be the same story one more time.

The new terminal is glass, and fine, and forgettable. Behind it the old one is still there: a low round building with a ribbed roof running away in a curve. And standing over it on a single concrete stalk is the control tower.

It goes up as a plain shaft and then flares near the top into a wide disc with a ring of round windows set into the underside of it, steps back in to a smaller drum, and finishes with the glazed cab. Armenian letters run around the rim. It is a flying saucer on a chimney, and it is completely serious about being one.

Nobody was being ironic

That’s the thing about this kind of architecture, and it took me the whole four days to work it out properly. Nobody here was doing a style. In the 1970s an airport was where a country said out loud what it thought was coming, and what this country thought was coming had a saucer on it.

You could not build this now. Not because of the engineering — because nobody is that certain any more.

I shot it over a railing on the way to the gate, into the last of the sun, with the clouds going pink behind it. I had about a minute, and then I went and got on a plane in the new building, which nobody is going to photograph in fifty years.