About one type of oriental residential building in the city of Ani, the medieval capital of Armenia

The study of architectural planning structure of two houses discovered in Ani during archaeological work in recent decades was undertaken in order to clarify their typological characteristics, architectural features and their place in the history of housing construction in the East. Acquaintance with the publications of archaeologists, the field surveys of objects in Ani undertaken by the authors led to the identification of a complex of stable features in these buildings, which made it possible to identify a range of typological analogies in the 12^th–13^th palace architecture of Armenians, Georgians, Seljuks of Asia Minor: the palace of Paron in Ani, the palace in Geghuti, built by the Georgian king George III around 1156, the palaces of Kubadabad, built in the first half of the 13^th century. In the early Middle Ages, this idea was the basis for urban estates of the 19^th–10^th centuries in the Semirechye region of the Central Asia, there were still Sogdians. In some forms, in the structure of a four- or two-column covered courtyard, most likely, the embodiment of the central cell of a traditional Armenian residential building was added to the general idea. Two variants of creating such a cell could be presented in the two studied houses of Ani: with four columns in the corners of the central square and a two-column type based on the columns supported of opposing wooden beams. The probable prototypes of the general compositional idea of these houses in the architecture of Parthia and Sasanian Iran have been identified.