Ph.D

Afshar Babak, P.H. D student will complete his P.H. D thesis on “Architecture and Power A Historical Perspective to the Simultaneous Genesis of the "Contemporary Architecture" and the "Modern State" in Iran” in Wednesday, May 3rd, 2017 at 10:00 AM.The Amphitheater of School of Architecture and Environmental Design.

Supervisors:

Dr. Gholamhossein Memarian and Dr. Asghar Mohammad Moradi

Ph.D. Committee:

 Dr. Mostafa Kiani, Dr. Pirouz Hanachi

 Dr. Abbas Yazdanfar and Dr. Mohsen Faizi

Abstract

Throughout the last century in Iran, iconic buildings have been conceived as apparatuses to educate the public through embodiment of national identity, and too as the affecttees of a contemporary cultural persona called the mēmar (equivalent to the architect), who is considered to be the conveyer of the universal knowledge and expertise regarding this special type of embodiment. None of the above mentioned characteristics was differentiable in relation to buildings in pre-modern Iran and it was only through the consolidation of the modern state’s authority over the land, from the midst of Qajar era to the beginning of the Pahlavi dynasty, that such contemporary perception of the construction work emerged in modern-day Iran.

Major researches in the field of architectural studies, have been largely understood this significant transformation in the history of the Iranian architecture, in the form of a causal relationship from power to architecture: as a subset of measures taken by a collection of new wills (from Reza-shah himself to the architects educated in the west, or the newly-established government institutions and also the community of the political-cultural elites); or a subset of the influences resulted from new ideas (such as Modernism or Nationalism), which the transformations in the field of architecture are being considered as a reflection of their occurrence in the mentality of the Iranian society. The intention of this thesis is not to disproof such explanatory approaches, but to expand the scope of the explanation to an a priori level: a quest for a limited description of an intricate causal constellation which, parallel, and not prior, to the genesis of the modern state in Iran, has realigned the newfound wills and ideas (as the concrete manifestations of power) towards architecture.

Tracing this causal constellation’s path through time, this dissertation has, by means of a reverse historiography (from present to past), evaluated and re-interpreted a diverse collection of historical documents, which are indicating the modes of conceiving buildings in Iran, signifying the wills and the ideas not in their abstract but in their historical forms, as they have been attributed to the buildings: from the specialized texts of The Architect journal (in the second half of 1940s) to the first-ever writings in Farsi about architecture in its contemporary sense by Karim Taherzadeh Behzad (in the early 1920s); and next, from the representation of buildings in the first official illustrated newspapers in Iran (before the Constitutional Revolution of 1906) to the unique method of depicting built environment in the paintings of Persian illustrated manuscripts (from the Safavid and the Timurid periods).

These evaluations, in particular, highlight the historical significance of the Naseri era in the contemporizing process of the Iranian architecture. An era during which the rising of a new set of imagery techniques in the overlapping fields of painting, photography and lithography, intersecting with a complex of cultural-political elements, lead to a major shift in the way of seeing buildings in Iran: the remains of the old Iranian-Miniature-based visual order was replaced with an embodiment-based (Tajassomi) visual order which itself created a foundation for the contemporary understanding of architecture in the modern-day Iran.

This transformation linked the formation of the modern state (within its embryonic stages) and the visibility of architectural form as a whole in Iran. As a result, almost half a century prior to the clear inclination of the first verbal formulations of the ideas like Modernism or Nationalism towards buildings, they were put in the path of becoming the embodied monuments of the nation-state, particularly due to the ways they were seen. From this point of view, it is safe to say the Naseri era had the significant role of a condition of possibility in regard to the phenomenon of the modernist-nationalist architecture of the first Pahlavi era and its inherent measures which itself have served as an exemplar for the Iranian contemporary architecture.

Keywords: modern state; Iranian contemporary architecture; first Pahlavi architecture; Naseri architecture; visual perception; Iranian miniature; painting; photography; lithography.