Alexander Tamanyan was born in Russia, trained in St. Petersburg, and was already an established architect when the Armenian Republic was formed in 1918. He moved to Yerevan in 1923. A people that had just survived the Genocide needed a capital — not just a city, but a statement of permanence. The population was roughly 30,000. There was no coherent urban plan. Tamanyan drew one. The Government House, the Opera House, the master street grid, the neoclassical facades cut from Armenian volcanic tufa — all Tamanyan. He died in 1936 before the plan was complete. The city that finished itself around his blueprint is what Yerevan is today.The design shows him mid-work — leaning over the drafting table, hands planted, eyes down. Not a portrait. The man in the act. Behind him, the neoclassical façade rises in blueprint linework — his work visible behind the worker. The arcs sweep outward in terracotta and teal, the radius of a compass across the whole composition. Above his name: Blueprint of a Nation. That is exactly what it was.