With greetings and a warm welcome to all our esteemed guests — ladies and gentlemen.
Tonight, in this place, architects and lovers of architecture have gathered to pay tribute to architecture. They have also gathered to register, by their presence, the date on which the results of an evaluation of recent currents in our country's contemporary architecture are announced. Regular and methodical evaluation is a major pillar of any society's culture-making, and in every period it is carried out in a particular form, and by particular institutions.
After the Revolution, the forces of architecture were struck both by dispersion and by under-work. Society had no specific demand of architects, and architects had no specific proposal for society. As that condition continued, the feeling was slowly forming that architecture could no longer play a cultural role — meaning a role in which architecture acts as an instrument of a society's maturing and growth, and architects turn the work of architecture into an elevating social function.
Architecture is the most social of professions, and is connected to all the affairs of society. That connection is established by various institutions, both inside and outside the profession. Even before the Revolution we did not have institutions sufficiently capable of fully establishing the link between society and architects. But even those weak institutions, precisely because of their weakness, could not endure the waves of the Revolution: they either fell apart, or were emptied from within. The relations of architects with society, and of society with architects, were reduced to a minimum.
The architect's relation to society is not summed up in the simple consultant-and-client relation. Architecture does not give meaning to one or two clients; it gives meaning to life. Life is not defined by this or that client; life is the sum of human relationships shaped over the lifespan of generations, and thousands of institutions take part in that shaping. It is not without reason that 'omr (life-span) and me'mari (architecture) come from the same root: the first denotes the temporal mode of human existence, and the second denotes the inseparability of the temporal and spatial dignity of human existence.
The architect must be in connection with the institutions belonging to him — with those thousands of institutions of life. An institution is nothing but an organised connection among human beings. If the connection is broken, the work of the individual is reduced to fruitless flailing. The individual gains meaning and effect through his connection; the connection in turn takes on meaning through the individual. But the connection itself is brought into being by the individual: until the individual's work exists, no connection arises; and until the connection exists, no individual finds an identity.
When an institution, or an organised connection, is emptied of itself, the individual and the connection disappear together. So now that a relation does not come about without the individual, and the individual is not the source of any effect without the relation, how should a fallen-down or self-emptied institution be reconstructed, or another institution be brought into being in its place? Have we not seen that, sometimes, individuals feel that no one hears their voice, no one understands what they say, that they have no addressee?
We do not know how voices reach one another, or how human beings find one another; but slowly it has been proved that the feeling that architecture had no role in the culture of society was not correct. The forces of architecture, after passing through a period of dispersion and under-work and stagnation, are striving — in spite of their differing individual ways — to create a coherent social force and to perform architecture's civilisational role.
We do not count this evening as a victory, because what we have lost is more than what we have gained. But we can count it as an opportunity: by evaluating achievements correctly, by saying 'well done' to the hands that brought those achievements about, by separating the sound from the unsound, and by entrusting the assaying to the assayers, we can help to bind together once more our broken links with the rising course of architectural culture.
Peaks stand at the highest of heights. Even in the simplest everyday work the appetite for greatness is far from us all. But it is that one peak that gives meaning to all the slopes. The slope, too, while it faces upward, is not to be blamed; for in the end it carries the soul up to the height. The slope deserves blame only when it turns its back to the peak and becomes a road of descent into the abyss.
Gentlemen, ladies,
Our happiness this evening is that we feel our architecture has set out on the path of elevation and ascent. Although today the share of good and worthwhile architecture in the entire activity carried out under the name of architecture is very small, the very fact that good architecture, even in its smallness, can — beyond its professional function (the answer to a client's commission) — also play a cultural role (defining the architecture of its own period) is itself a great advance for the elevation of architecture.
We must be grateful to all the persons and institutions who, over the past ten years, helped to make architectural competitions and awards take hold. The Grand Memar Award is the natural continuation of that ten-year course. Every competition and award that was held was an experience in evaluation and judgement. Architecture's friends expect that the continuation of these evaluations and judgements will lead to the codification of architecture's principles and values. That expectation is a rightful one — and naturally one of the achievements of the competitions and awards is the development and consolidation of architecture's theoretical foundations.
But is it not more fitting that, instead of values, we attend to the things-of-value themselves? And that we keep in mind that values depend on things-of-value, not things-of-value on values? Value is something made by our minds and has no real existence. Because we forget the origin of values, we suppose values themselves to be independent.
The values of yesterday's architecture were made by architects themselves; today's values, too, will be made by architects themselves. The making of values by architects does not contradict the fact that architecture, since it is a human function and the human foundation of the human being does not change, must have a foundation that is essential and unalterable. If it were not so, we could not, without any hesitation, place an example from five thousand years ago and one of today under the same heading of architecture.
What is important is much work, and maturity, and entry into the realm of architectural creation. The clearest difference between the works that drew the jury's attention in the Grand Memar Award '80 — which you will see today in the exhibition — and the works that could not compete with them, was that, before any value that can be put into a phrase, those works had managed (relatively, of course) — by not contenting themselves with the ordinary work and by not surrendering to the acceptable level of values — to raise themselves to a higher level. Of course principles and techniques must be learned; presenting work properly, which is in no way separable from architecture, must also be learned; and every part of the work must be done with skill and correctness.
Ladies, gentlemen,
The fundamental difference between the Grand Memar Award and the competitions and awards that came before it was: first, that it coincided with the most lively and most spirited period of post-revolutionary architecture, the second half of the seventies decade; second, that by excluding state-built civil works and assigning the award to non-governmental work, it admitted a far wider stratum of architects — and especially of the young — to participation; and third, that with the support of a private company in the holding of the award, the first complete co-operation and organisation between the architectural profession and a major construction-supplies manufacturer took shape.
It is a very great success for architects that they have managed to bring this natural closeness between the architectural profession and a major construction-supplies manufacturer about, on the scale of a cultural undertaking. Is it not a great success for architecture that today, instead of the meagre support of governmental bodies, it has the generous support of the private sector at its disposal? Of course we need the support of the government and welcome it; and the government's greatest support is to help us be a strong, non-governmental civil society.
I am bound to say — even though Mr. Karim-zadeh, the honoured managing director of Behrizan, is himself a co-organiser of the Grand Memar Award '80 along with the Memar Nashr Institute, and is your host this evening, dear guests — that I must declare the utmost gratitude of myself and of all my colleagues at Memar Nashr Institute for this great and unprecedented cultural undertaking, in which he was the first to step forward. I likewise thank all his colleagues who, throughout the holding of the competition, joined hands with us.
