The Armenian Cultural Heritage Institute (ACHI) grew out of the Armenian Heritage Scanning Project, launched in 2020 by TUMO. As part of that initiative, young people and professionals collaborated to 3D scan hundreds of historical sites across Armenia and Artsakh, using laser scanning and photogrammetry. TUMO English Copywriter and Editor Serena Hajjar Bakunts observed the fieldwork and discussed the ambitious project with Hulé Kechichian, general director of ACHI and head of special projects at TUMO.

Early on a cool Tuesday morning, I found myself sitting in the back of an off-road vehicle, gripping the railing that separated me from the steep cliffside that opened on my left. We wound our way up the mountain, the wind whipping against our faces, and entered the Khosrov Forest State Reserve. As we drove deeper into the wilderness, our connection to the rest of the world gradually faded, a reality confirmed by the disappearing signal on our phones.

Eventually, we stopped at the old stone Bayburd Church, whereupon my fellow passengers, a small team of monument scanners from ACHI, disembarked with their multiple bags of heavy equipment. I would spend the next four hours observing the three of them meticulously document the church through a combination of photogrammetry and 3D laser scanning.

Origins

The predecessor to ACHI emerged in the wake of the 2020 Artsakh War, when TUMO CEO Marie Lou Papazian initiated the Armenian Heritage Scanning Project to document ancient Armenian monuments in the few weeks before the loss of territories. Today, this initiative has grown into ACHI, which shares a space with TUMO Studios on Aram Street in downtown Yerevan.

Though the ACHI website launched only last year, in December 2025, TUMO’s students and lab leaders have been operating behind the scenes for years. In 2018, TUMO began hosting 3D scanning learning labs for its students, taught by professionals from abroad. Among the first scanned monuments is the Ghazanchetsots Cathedral, which TUMO Stepanakert students were able to digitally preserve prior to its tragic shelling in 2020. After the signing of the November 9, 2020 ceasefire treaty, the TUMO team realized that it had a short window of opportunity, just 2-3 weeks, before the handover of territories to Azerbaijan. Leveraging its existing scanning network, TUMO rallied a team of volunteers who, together with professionals from France, hurried to Artsakh, where they managed to scan over 40 monuments before the deadline.

In 2022, just before the imposition of the 10-month blockade, the TUMO team managed to organize another site visit to Artsakh, which resulted in an additional 40 scanned monuments. Back in Yerevan, the group realized the imperative of conducting this scanning work within Armenia itself, especially along the border regions, in light of Azerbaijan’s September 2022 incursion into Armenia. Even putting aside the escalating tensions, digital preservation would serve as a powerful repository for memory in the face of physical decay, poor conservation, and earthquakes, all of which have led to the numerous ruins and collapsing monuments that pepper the Armenian landscape.

Today, ACHI has over 280 scanned monuments, plus numerous artifacts, such as ceramics, vishap stones, and khachkars (cross stones), under its belt. “At some point, we had to stop and ask ourselves how we would make this information publicly available,” recalls Hulé Kechichian, general director of ACHI and head of special projects at TUMO. “It’s also in TUMO’s DNA to make knowledge and information accessible, to produce materials for education, creation, and so on. That’s how we decided to create ACHI’s open-access website.”

Behind the Scenes

I first met Kechichian in her office on Aram Street, in one of the old, black-tuff buildings that recalls a Yerevan of yesteryear. Speaking with great animation and enthusiasm, she recalled the years that led to today’s ACHI and the Institute’s multifaceted projects.

When I asked her to recount the most rewarding moment in her work with the Institute, she cites the publication of the ACHI site, as it represents the first permanent public-facing showcase of what the Institute has been, “almost secretly,” working on for more than five years. Visitors can currently peruse 35 3D models of monuments on the open-access website, while the remaining are being converted into 3D models — a process that, much like scanning itself, requires significant patience. Accompanying each monument is historical information, archival photos that partner institutions and organizations have shared, and more.

Additionally, Kechichian and her team want visitors to experience the life of the monument in full, reflecting ACHI’s mission to preserve heritage as a “living resource.” To accomplish this, they plan to initiate an oral history project to interview people who live near the monument, or who have a specific history with it. “We’ve had so many people walk up to us during field trips and start telling us stories about a monument, and when you try to Google those stories to learn more, they’re nowhere to be found,” she remarks. “One person even told us, ‘I’m the last person who can tell you this story!’ It says something about the passing of time. At some point, that story is going to vanish, and we want to grasp that aspect of the livelihood of a place and put it on the website so that we don’t have just a cold 3D model on display, but a full picture of how people engaged with the monument.”

Kechichian hopes that, after browsing the site, visitors will be inspired to use the monuments as fuel for creation. “We don’t see history, or heritage, as an endpoint from the past, but as a starting point for future creation, future research — in short, for the future,” she explains. “We want people to, for example, discover a carving on the side of the Aghitu Memorial and make jewelry in that form. We want them to translate the past into new creation, new thinking, new creativity.”

Interactive History

A unique feature of the website is the crowdsourcing element, which encourages visitors to submit their own story, photo, or research related to a specific monument. “It was very important for us to approach this from a place of humility,” shares Kechichian, “because we’re not a research center. That’s not what we do. We do the high-quality laser scanning and the photogrammetry, we create the 3D models, and we try to gather as much data as possible, but we know that there is a ton of valuable, high-quality information all around us. So, we want to encourage people to contribute whatever they might want to share with us, be it a story, a photo, or facts.”

One of the tensions that ACHI frequently confronts in this work is the trade-off between respectful preservation and creative experimentation. “We are producing the most accurate, detailed, state-of-the-art 3D models possible. You cannot produce something more accurate,” says Kechichian. “At the same time, we want to promote experimentation and creation. If you take this heritage and decide that you want to transform it into something else, you will inevitably come up against tension.” This balance is especially difficult to maintain when the heritage in question is simultaneously being denied and endangered. “It’s a road that has not yet been explored, and we’re trying to carve out the appropriate space for us. You have to have the right narrative to be taken seriously, while sticking to your vision of creativity and not just traditional conservation,” she adds.

International Footprint

Offline, ACHI has had prominent showings at numerous international exhibitions. Last year, the Institute represented Armenia at the prestigious Venice Architecture Biennale, which marked Armenia’s first return to the Architecture Biennale since 2015. In keeping with the “Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective.” theme, ACHI prepared an ambitious pavilion that explored the complex interplay between memory and architecture. After training an AI model on Armenian architecture using all the information contained within ACHI’s existing 3D models, the team prompted the AI to generate Armenian designs that were then carved into tuff stone and presented at the Biennale.

“There are so many Armenian monuments that are not accessible to us anymore. They only live in our memories. And because our brain constantly reshapes our memories, our recollection of these monuments is actively being distorted,” explains Kechichian. “We thought it would be interesting to see how AI could help translate our memories into physical space. Even though we fed the AI all of the information we had about Armenian monuments, it still created some hallucinations, which is, in itself, an illustration of how memory works and how we recall (or fail to recall) what we’ve lost. It was very important for us to have those issues represented at an international event where the global community could be made aware of these realities.”

Challenges

Naturally, this work is not without its share of challenges, which span everything from the physical to the technical. The physical difficulty of the field trips cannot be overstated. The team often scans in remote places that can be very difficult to access, a reality I experienced firsthand in Khosrov. Kechichian recounts an even more extreme episode that demonstrates the unique nature of this work: “One time, we were in Syunik to scan a monument just a few meters away from the border with Azerbaijan, and our driver refused to take us past a certain point, as he was concerned about approaching the border. So, our team had to walk one kilometer with all of their heavy equipment. The work sometimes takes us to uncomfortable places.”

The equipment ACHI uses, from the computers to the graphic cards, comes with a high price tag, which also explains the lag between the number of 3D models that have been processed and the number of scans that have already been completed in the field. The team is constantly working on expanding its capacity, as the skillset required to complete this work is in rare supply. TUMO continues to regularly organize learning labs for TUMO students — the 3D modeling specialist and experimental photographer Jason Perez has hosted 10 labs since 2018 — to not only teach them how to scan the monuments, but also instill in them a deep appreciation for their heritage, encouraging a sense of ownership and pride. “Teaching the students how to treat the monuments as the treasures that they are is another important element of our work,” shares Kechichian.

On the Horizon

Looking ahead, Kechichian stresses the importance of continuously building on the monument scanning work. The goal is to scan all the monuments located within Armenia and expand to others in places such as Western Armenia. “We want to keep cruising, creating, and innovating, not get complacent,” says Kechichian.
For her, long-term success lies not only in preserving heritage, but in ensuring that it remains a living part of our cultural reality. The goal is for the knowledge, stories, and forms documented by ACHI to inspire new creations and become integrated into everyday life, rather than existing solely as objects preserved behind glass or stored in archives. “We want people to engage with the content we offer, make it their own, and build on it. Heritage should not be frozen in time. It should continue to live, evolve, inspire, and shape contemporary culture.”