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TUMO Studios, a non-profit educational program implemented by the TUMO Center for Creative Technologies with the generous support of the John and Hasmik Mgrdichian Foundation, will soon have a second location at 44 Aram Street, Yerevan. The planned renovations of the historic building will allow the TUMO Studios to double its student intake and expand the students’ production capacity. These renovations will be done with minimal intervention to the building, ensuring its architectural integrity and design remain intact.
The early 20th-century black tuff building was built in the 1910s and owned by a wealthy Yerevan entrepreneur named Fadey Thadevosyan. Later, in 1921, it was owned by Romanos Melikyan and functioned as a music studio. This led to its transformation into the first campus for the Komitas State Conservatory of Yerevan in 1923 which stayed there through 1948. It became the remote branch of the Armenian State Pedagogical Institute before welcoming its most recent occupant, the Yerevan Institute of Philosophy, Sociology, and Law, in 1969. The institute recently moved its offices to the National Academy of Sciences building.
After nearly a century of serving as a place of education and cultural production, 44 Aram St. will be able to continue its longstanding tradition through TUMO Studios.
In the six years since its inception, TUMO Studios has operated on the second floor of another historic building at 38 Pushkin Street, where it has provided technical courses and product design workshops to over 750 young professionals. But the center is running out of space. Currently, over 600 young people have applied for 165 learning spots at TUMO Studios, its shop can no longer hold student productions that are in high demand, and its growing operations have outgrown the existing workshop spaces. The addition of the new location will more than quadruple its facilities, addressing all of these challenges.
The new TUMO Studios location will open its doors to the public in April of 2024. In addition to its regular educational program, the new location will also host lectures and other events around design, and arts and crafts open to everyone. 44 Arami Street will help realize the vision of TUMO Studios, allowing more young Armenians to master Armenian artisanal traditions, and enabling a new generation of designers and craftspeople to create the future of Armenian design.
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