CATALOG RAISONNÉ






Edgar Papazian is an artist-architect who has practiced architecture with a license.


He believes architecture has the capacity to heal and protect by providing personal space for privacy and thought, free from reductive and restrictive social class roles.

The many drawings herein are meant to be considered research, autonomous from any built analogues and not simply instruments of service.

Edgar is a graduate of Columbia and Yale Universities and is professor at the New York Institute of Technology, Old Westbury, USA, where he teaches architectural studios at a college level. He was president of American Institute of Architecture - Peconic chapter  in 2024.

This website serves as a location for current research and creative projects (SET-A), and also as a repository of digitised hand-drawn works created between 1993 and 2024 both as a student and as a pracitising architect (SET-B).









“...He apparently had no significant master and followed no specific architectural tradition. Like some other priest-architects from the major orders... he was first of all an intellectual - a mathematician and a philosopher - and for him architecture was a form of erudition.”   -Richard Pommer (referring to the architect Guarino Guarini), Eighteenth-Century Architecture in Piedmont, 1961. Edgar Birge Papazian    e.papazian.73@gmail.com




SHOW: All  SET—A  SET—B
2500.01
2025, Sag Harbor, USADrawing:  protest entry, 2025 Daniel Rowen Design Awards, AIA Peconic.  Color pencil on Strathmore board. 22”x14.5”

Submitted for AIA annual awards event as a protest against ‘business as usual.’ The housing crisis is affecting the east end of long island acutely, and the elevation of housing for the 1% is simply not ethical. This envisions a future scenario literally out of the ashes of climate change.

The decision to make a pencil drawing allowed me to not dither as much and craft a proposal in “one go.”

Project Narrative:

The desertion of so many of the region’s second homeowners after big burns of 2029 and 2035 gave us the political ability (an “HOV lane for housing” as it was put) to rezone the areas around our village centers for denser community housing, for what we might call volunteer-species dwellings, aka the Phoenix Houses. 

After the fires, only the foundations of the mega-mansions from the Biden and Trump years -- which had gone up in smoke along with most of the oaks and all of the pines -- remained, and certain pioneering architect-developers and community advocates came up with ways to reuse the existing concrete foundations, with their embodied carbon intact, to create a denser, but no less rich type of housing for multiple families, some current displaced residents, some more recent transplants.

Using new steel dunnage to span the existing foundation depth, special prefabricated housing units were trucked over and dropped in. The housing featured efficient footprints similar to the traditional “shotgun” type from the Southern US and incorporated the desire to live mostly outdoors during the mild shoulder seasons. The houses were designed to avoid burning, with numerous tempered windows with shutters, fiber-cement siding, and featured on-site sewage treatment and solar energy generation. The grounds were given a defensible space of 100 feet and were shared among residents, who lived informally together in each pod-village that had once been the grounds of the former McMansion.

Competition
Hamptons Phoenix Houses
Communiy Housing
Pencil Drawings
2400.03
2024, Sag Harbor, USADrawing explorations of San Carlino alle Quattro Fontane, Rome, Italy

Commentary:  portion of a “drawing conversation” had on Instagram between myself and Victor Agran, architect,  former classmate at Yale. 

Research:  Metric analysis of a space through the extensive documentation provided by Paolo Portoghesi in his monograph on Borromini. Inspiration also via Andrew Saunders’ Lidar images. 

Exploration
Francesco Castello Borromini Baroque architecture
San Carlino
2400.02
2024, Sag Harbor, USA Architectural competition entry, new Gyumri covered market and culinary school, Gyumri, Armenia, sponsored by Tumo Ctr. for Creative Technologies.

Commentary:  Using traditional Armenian stone vaulting techniques architect created a series of arcades which were seismically separated from the earth in this active earthquake zone. Entry.

Competition
Armenia
Gyumri
covered market
shouka
2400.01
06–28–2024, Water Mill, USAPecha Kucha presentation, “The Future that Never Happened” can be viewed here.  Presented at the Parrish Art Museum. 

Commentary:  speaking “truth to power” in a Hamptons, NY context. 

Lecture
Dystopian Hamptons
Pecha Kucha
sustainability
2300.01
2023, Sag Harbor, USAFortress Armenia Illustration. 

Commentary:  during the Azerbaijaini invasion of Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh) in 2023, I produced this commentary, showing a “porcupine” fortresslike Armenia able to defend its borders through military prowess, an aspiration for the country. 

Illustration
Armenia
Artsakh
Nagorno-Karabagh
Fortress Armenia
2400.02
2029-2024, various locations Life drawings, ongoing explorations.

Commentary:  colleceted from the past few years of sketching from life. I owe some of my approach to life drawing to Elke Solomon, art professor at Columbia University, who herself offered the drawings of Pierre Bonnard as an example to follow, with their multiple gestures and textures. That as well as the first year freehand drawing course taught at Yale by Philip Grausman and William (Bill) Butler.

Exploration
life drawing sketchbook pencil 
pen
Pierre Bonnard
Elke Solomon
Philip Grausman
William Butler
2300.02
2023, Andes, USABook of Sleep preparatory drawings.

Commentary:  childrens’ book. 

Research:  each image leads into the next via distance cues, following the path of an itinerant child. All of these drawings used a CAD underlay. 18x24.

Sketch 
line drawing, perspective
childrens
book


2301.01
2023, Sag Harbor, USA
Four bedroom house in [location witheld]. Incorporates brise soleil, shou sugi ban siding, and sensitive siting based on a unique plot of land with mature tress. Called “house in the hollow.” Design attempted to line up views of trees from the interior framed in vertical windows and joined horizontal skylights.

Commentary:  unexecuted. Entry for 2024 Daniel Rowen design awards for Peconic chapter of the American Institure of Architects. 
Design
modern house
2400.04
2024, Sag Harbor, USARenovation scheme for a 1950’s Peter Blake house in Water Mill, NY.





Design
modernist house renovation
2301
2023, Sag Harbor, USA1980’s house renovation in [location witheld].

Commentary: unexecuted. This project was mostly designed when the owners decided to tear down the house and start a new house design from scratch.

Architect was dismissed after this switch. Builder continued to work with the owners.

Code:  REB



Design
garage addition
bedroom addition
©2024Edgar B. Papazian