Ex-Professor to Rebuild Armenian City

An American expert in earthquake reconstruction has worked out an agreement to rebuild Leninakan, one of the Soviet Armenian cities leveled by a quake last December.

Eduardo Lozano, a former professor of urban planning at Harvard University who has helped rebuild devastated cities in Peru and Nicaragua, said Sunday he will draft a master plan for the city. Lozano and officials in Moscow and Armenia, a Soviet republic, agreed on the plan last week.

"I wasn't sure it said exactly what it was supposed to say, because it's in Russian," he said of the document. "But as soon as I got back I took it over to be translated, and it turned out to be exactly what I thought."

Lozano, 52, said money for the planning and much of the reconstruction are being raised by Armenian relief agencies in the West.

He said his Cambridge-based architecture firm, Lozano, White & Associates Inc., expects to spend about a year on the project, beginning in June with an aerial survey of Leninakan.

The city, which had 220,000 residents before two enormous tremors and several smaller ones toppled most of its buildings on Dec. 7, is now a maze of army tents, shoddy temporary shelters and half-destroyed buildings.

"The most haunting sight--I'll never forget it--was an old Byzantine church cut open, right in half, as if with a saw," Lozano said.

Soviet officials have estimated that the quake killed 40,000 to 55,000 people in the cities of Leninakan, Spitak and Kirovakan and in up to 100 villages.

Lozano said he plans to bring Soviet architects to Cambridge in late summer for training in urban planning, computer-aided design and methods of making buildings resistant to earthquakes.

He said his master plan will call for reconstructing the 75- to 150-year old stone buildings in the city's center, which withstood the quake much better than the newer apartment blocks on the outskirts.

He said he would like to see a new city hub built north of the city, with athletic facilities, schools and shops. Instead of large orphanages, Lozano said he will call for dozens of small group homes linked to schools.

"Those kids should not be in an institution, and they should not be torn from their roots and sent to other cities," he said.

A native of Argentina, Lozano came to the United States in 1962 to study architecture and urban design. After receiving a doctorate from Harvard, he taught at Harvard and Princeton universities and then founded Lozano, White & Associates with partner Lindsay White in 1974.

The firm, which has 20 employees, planned the reconstruction of a university campus outside of Lima, Peru, and drafted a master plan for Managua, the Nicaraguan capital, after it was hit by a huge quake in 1972.

Lozano said he was contacted by Soviet officials about Leninakan a few days after the quake, when a delegation from Yerevan, the Armenian capital, visited Cambridge, its American sister city.

He said he went to Armenia this month to assess the devastation at the invitation of Yerevan's vice-mayor, Babken Vardanyan, the head of the delegation that visited Cambridge.

Although his firm's payment depends on the success of independent fund-raising efforts, Lozano said he is not concerned about the fees.

"I'm committed to do it, no matter what," he said. "This is what I live for. I don't have a yacht. I don't ski. I love what I do -- which is to plan cities."