Bagrat K Ioannisiani

A Designer's Diary Bagrat K Ioannisiani

In 1964, an important US-USSR citizen diplomacy initiative took a group of Soviet scientists on a unique journey around the United States. The visitors went to the National Naval Observatory in DC, the Harvard (later Smithsonian) Observatory in Boston, the Yerkes Observatory at Williams Bay, Wisconsin, the Lowell Observatory near Flagstaff, Arizona, Mount Palomar Observatory and Lick Observatory in California. They visited Yellowstone, Disneyland and Rockefeller Center. They toured DC monuments, listened to music in San Francisco jazz clubs, at the Boston Symphony, as well as New York's The Bitter End. They shopped, amid the holiday rush, at Macy's and Sears. Along the journey, one group member, design engineer Bagrat Ioannisiani, captured his thoughts and impressions in notes, sketches and photographs. This diary is published to commemorate the 110th anniversary of Bagrat Ioannisiani's birth in Yerevan, Armenia in 1911.