The COAF Smart Center, designed by Paul Kaloustian Architects, is a pioneering model for delivering superior and regionally relevant educational, social, economic, and community programs in rural areas. It emphasizes technology, sustainability, the arts, music, modern healthcare and lifestyle, linguistics and languages, and business and civic engagement.
COAF Smart Center Technical Information
- Architects: Paul Kaloustian
- Typology: Cultural Architecture / Cultural Center
- Location: Lori Province – Armenia
- Completion year: 2017
- Images: © Courtesy of Paul Kaloustian,
The design focuses on architecture and its relation with nature enabling a different view of architecture and the void. The landscape becomes the heart of the project while program is arranged around it enabling a new reading of the built environment as a new nature.
– Paul Kaloustian
COAF Smart Center Photographs
COAF Smart Center Renders and Construction Photographs
COAF Smart Center Description
Operating as a state-of-the-art, scalable learning and knowledge exchange hub, SMART will implement COAF programs based on models that have charted success in 22 villages in the Armavir and Aragatsotn regions of Armenia over the past decade.
The SMART concept will allow scalability throughout rural regions. Smart campuses will respect the integrity of rural aesthetics in sync with modern architectural design, maintaining the authenticity of the region, while encouraging progressive ideology. Each campus will utilize sustainable and green design, off the grid components and renewable energy.
The Smart Center building, which is currently under construction, is located in the north Armenian province of Lori. The structure’s organic form embraces the landscape by creating a sinuous ribbon-like walkway that leads to a 7000 m2 courtyard. The one-story building is spread horizontally while following the site’s topography.
The Smart Center accommodates world-class speakers from global influencers through interconnected virtual classrooms, meeting areas, computer labs for student and youth clubs, an auditorium for performances and presentations, a library and studios for languages, arts, and music, and a restaurant.
It can also accommodate program participants and visiting collaborators in guest quarters and will feature outdoor activities, indoor workshops, and vibrant greenhouses to train and enable developing children and adult villagers in regionally relevant skills.
Architecture establishes a new approach regarding landscape and nature. It tries to engage with the scale of the landscape by creating a form that embraces the surroundings and creates ambiguity as it creates an environment more than a building.
The design focuses on architecture and its relation with nature, enabling a different view of architecture and the void. The landscape becomes the heart of the project while the program is arranged around it, enabling a new reading of the built environment as a new nature.
COAF Smart Center Plans
COAF Smart Center Gallery
About COAF
Children of Armenia Fund (COAF) is a non-profit, non-governmental 501(c) (3) organization. It uses community-led approaches to reduce rural poverty, with a particular focus on youth. Since its inception in 2004, COAF has funded and implemented educational, healthcare, community, and economic development programs serving more than 8,000 people in rural villages of Armenia.
In 2015, COAF debuted SMART, an unprecedented model for delivering superior and regionally relevant holistic educational programs in rural areas emphasizing technology, sustainability, the arts, health, linguistics, business, and civic engagement.
Learn more at www.coafkids.org
About PAUL KALOUSTIAN
Paul Kaloustian Studio is a Beirut-based Architecture and Design practice that works on projects ranging from buildings to interiors. He received his Master’s at Harvard Graduate School of Design and worked at Herzog and de Meuron in Basel, Switzerland, before starting his practice in 2002. Paul has taught at the Boston Architecture Center (2000) and the American University of Beirut (2009-10).
He received the Moukbel Award and the Order of Engineers and Architects Award. His project “House in a Forest” was exhibited at the 13th Venice Biennale, the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris and London in the exhibition “Atlas of the Unbuilt World.”
