The neo-historical period of modern Armenian architecture began in the 1920s with Alexander Tamanyan, who introduced for the first time the idea of modernisation of medieval traditional architecture. Until the mid-1950s, when the famous Khrushchev decree regarding the notion of redundancy in architecture was issued (decree no. 1871, date 1955), Armenian architecture used a great deal of decorative motifs and ornamentations, yet remained sombre and ascetic in its overall aesthetics.

With the advent of typology-based design and construction industry, Soviet Armenian architects made the abrupt shift from traditional decorative architectural language to rather austere and minimalistic modernist architecture in the 1960s. Bas-reliefs were used during the first two decades of the modernism period (1960s-1970s) as means of diversifying otherwise austere and alien modernist architectural language. In the architecture of a building bas-reliefs were used locally, sometimes asymmetrically in the overall façade composition, very much in the compositional principles of medieval Armenian architecture. Bas-reliefs depicted primarily national symbols, modernized traditional ornaments, or scenes from national legends or history.