Alexander Tamanian (1878–1936) was a Russian-born Armenian architect who drew up the first general plan of modern Yerevan and designed many of its principal buildings. Born in Yekaterinodar into a banker's family, he graduated from the St Petersburg Academy of Arts in 1904 and became an Academician of Architecture in 1914. In 1923 he moved to Yerevan to lead building in the new Soviet republic. His plan for the city, approved in 1924, helped turn a small provincial town into a modern capital. His style joined neoclassicism to Armenian traditions, with facings of red tuff and carved stone, and he chaired the committee protecting the country's historic monuments.
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The Yerevan Opera Theatre (1953), named after the composer Alexander Spendiaryan, opened in 1933 and was finished in stages. The National Library of Armenia (1939), built to hold some seven million books, reinterprets early and medieval Armenian architecture in what became known as the "Tamanyan style". Government House, Yerevan (1941), on Republic Square, now the seat of the prime minister, earned him a Soviet State Award in 1942, after his death; he is buried in the city's Komitas Pantheon.
