By Dr. Dickran Kouymjian of the arts all the arts, architecture
is supreme. For the general public used to visiting museums
filled with paintings of compact size easily hung by the
hundreds, the priority given to architecture in the art world
may seem strange. But buildings are not susceptible to display
in museums, when reduced to photos or models, they seem pale
next to the immediate beauty of original art works. Thus,
architectural monuments are only accessible to the public by
distant travel or through specialized books. Art historians have
always put architecture in a different category; they have
measured the value of monuments by standards other than those
appropriate to smaller decorative creations in whatever medium.
too, in the realm of Armenian art, architecture takes pride of
place. It was the first of the arts of Armenia to be seriously
studied, and to this day Armenian architecture receives more
scholarly attention than all of the other arts combined. The
separateness of architecture from the ot