When, after years abroad, I returned to Iran, my situation was much like the early days when I had left the University of Tehran to continue my studies in Italy. The thing I most remember is the loneliness. The job I had found, although it carried the bombastic title of “senior consultant,” really had no relation to architecture. It had no real relation to anything: it was a municipal scheme-and-programme that had neither a scheme nor a programme. The most important task I performed during my six months on the payroll was writing my letter of resignation, with reasons attached — a letter which, I think, the deputy of the day tore up at least five times, forcing me to send it again.
My next post was at a consulting firm. From the very first day I took up the heavy work of producing waste paper and drinking endless cups of tea. I am glad that most of what I did then was not architecture in any meaningful sense — bad-taste so-called postmodern schemes, fruitless bound reports, master and detailed plans repeatedly cut to ribbons, and report after report dispatched to the archives.
It was in early 1373 SH, after about ten months back in Iran, that I first heard a piece of news that pleased me very much: the Iran Academies competition. I went to see the exhibition. The model Mirmiran had submitted shone among the others. I felt that, for the first time since my return, I was dealing with something that had the substance of architecture — a project that had something to say, something one could talk about. In those days I knew neither Mirmiran, nor the jury, nor any of the architecture magazines of the time. How well they knew me was perfectly clear! Somehow or other I wrote a critique of Mirmiran's project and got it printed in a magazine.
Seven years have passed since then, and in those seven years a number of pieces and critiques of mine have been published in Iran and in European countries. Whenever I look back, I see that the Iran Academies competition was a turning point in my professional life; without it I might well have gone in a different direction.
That competition, regardless of its unhappy outcome — namely the execution of the fifth-placed scheme — was, in terms of architectural culture, the most important event of all. It was after this competition that, for the first time, the question of architectural quality was raised on its own, free of the more or less fuzzy claims about identity and value. The National Library competition and the competitions that followed gradually established the discussion of architecture in this country as a serious, independent programme, and matters reached the point where today, occasionally, very brave and forward-looking projects pass through the filter of management and jury and find their way to realisation. The latest event of this kind is Bahram Shirdel's winning entry in the competition for the headquarters of the Tech Cooperation Office of the Presidency.
It seems that the holding of a competition has many dimensions, and the selection of one good project is only one of the values to be drawn from it. Raising the overall level of the architectural profession, education, the development of specialised journals, advances in building technology, the discovery of new talents, culture-building and dozens of other important opportunities are also among the achievements of a competition. The body that undertakes to hold a competition must attend to its many values and try to draw the greatest moral and material use from the situation it has created. Sadly, many still imagine that an architectural competition is a way of obtaining several different solutions for the price of a single design — like shopping at the big stores in sale season.
The competition is one of the oldest customs of architecture, and its history goes back at least to ancient Greece, to the time when a competition open to all was held for the building of the sacred precinct of the Acropolis temples (448 BC). If one consults history, one finds that, in the flowering of Italian architecture, the competition was inaugurated by the contest for the dome of the great church of Florence. In Iran, competitions among consultants and athletes have a long history, but no information remains about architectural competitions before the modern period. In their stead, books frequently cite cases in which a king or governor summoned the most distinguished artists of his time to build a new monument or city; Darius's inscription on the building of Persepolis shows that there was, in any case, a tight rivalry among the architects in the construction of old Iranian palaces.
The trouble of the competition, in any case, is bound up with the trouble of the architectural profession at large. For instance, it seems to me that the field of cinema has a clearer position than other disciplines, and if architecture were one day to find such a position, our work would be much easier. In cinema, the role of producer, director, screenwriter, set designer and cinematographer is clear; each of them has his own status and rank, and in the event of success collects fees several times those of the others. In architecture, every flaw and every merit is laid at the designer's door, and if there is any prize at all, it falls to the architect; rarely is the client, the structural engineer or the executor of a design rewarded. And no one is willing to pay a distinguished architect a single rial more than the going rate.
One of the issues is that architecture, like the other arts, needs a patron. As far as my reading allows me to say, great architects have always been backed by great men. Never has an uncultured client given rise to a great work or taken a great architect into his service. In the history of Iran, works such as Persepolis, the Arch of Ctesiphon, the Friday Mosque of Isfahan, the Registan of Samarqand, the Citadel of Ali Shah and the Maraghe Observatory — among the glories of our nation — were built by the efforts of great men: Darius the Great, Khwajeh Nizam-al-Mulk, Khwajeh Nasir-al-Din Tusi, Rashid-al-Din Fadlullah, Ghazan Khan, Shahrokh Shah and Shah Abbas the Great.
In today's world, large and important figures, companies and state bodies establish their social and economic credibility through the competition. Today, in the advanced world, even many industrial capitalists devote part of their income to holding architectural competitions and creating model projects. It is clear that the aim of holding a competition is not merely to engage one or several specialists for work that a single architect can manage on his own; the chief object is the realisation of a wide set of economic, advertising, cultural and technical aims, which is only possible through the competition.
Today many clients place enormous weight on the question of performance. In my view today's preoccupation should not be performance alone. Thirty years ago the great and respected industries of Switzerland and Japan competed with one another to build a watch that, over the course of a month, would err by only one or two seconds. Today every well-known watch reaches that accuracy. My point is that, in a serious competition, reaching a design that is functionally good must come together with the production of a significant work of art. It is art that raises the price of a painting from two hundred thousand tomans to twenty billion. Otherwise, any painter who has spent four years at art school can draw a fruit basket and a village landscape with precision. Art lies hidden in the artist's distinctive working, in his idea and his particular expression.
Today we observe with astonishment a client asking the country's best architect why his work does not have this or that feature; or asking a designer with global standing for his avant-garde projects why his work does not bear any sign of traditional architecture; or demanding that another, who is essentially a traditional designer, deliver a modern work. As if one were asking Mozart for something in the manner of Wagner. We have not yet been able to accept differences as values, and we should thank God that, despite the many slights of those active in the building world, there are still committed architects in Iran working in different ways. In a competition, the criteria, the programme, the aims, and even the inviting of architects with a particular leaning are entirely permissible; but to expect designers to align themselves with this or that leaning is misplaced.
A competition has three principal pillars: the client, the jury and the participants. Each of them must perform his duties properly. By the experience of recent years in Iran, most competitions have gone off the rails, because these three bodies have not done their work properly and have laid the blame on one another. For a competition to bear fruit, the client, the jury and the participants must hold themselves bound to do their duty in the best possible way and without compromise. The client cannot, on the pretext of the public's low understanding or unfavourable conditions, smother the execution of forward-looking schemes and the support of distinguished talents and squander public funds on banal projects. The jurors, too, have no right to make their independent judgement subject to dictated opinions or personal bookkeeping. The designers, in turn, must enter the field with the full reach of their capabilities.
In any case the most important matter in any competition is the protection of the participants' rights. The competition is a commitment, and faithfulness to a commitment, with proper execution, will not be obtained from misconduct. Clients who, in the middle of a competition, fall into doubt and trample on their commitments, or who set as a criterion conditions other than those announced in the brief, harm both themselves and the architectural culture. Sadly, in some cases the client has not even paid out all the announced prizes.
The holding of a competition is a kind of practice in democracy, and being subject to law is its first condition. Jurors are summoned from among the most reputable designers — especially those with a talent for criticism — and from among critics. For important competitions, foreign jurors are generally sought to sit on the panel as well. We have repeatedly heard from state managers: “We are no slouches in architecture; it is unbecoming to invite a foreign juror.” They imagine that, when the French look to a Dutch, English or Norwegian juror, they do so because they are weak in design — which is not the case.
Ignorance is the greatest destroyer of competitions. As a rule, the bodies that undertake to hold a competition do not have adequate information about its workings, and they do not consult experienced people in the field. If we wish, like other advanced countries, to carry out most public projects through the democratic and effective custom of the competition, we must have a competition law. The competition is a precise and effective method, and it has clearly defined rules. Holding a competition is not everyone's work; the regulations and principles of the competition are not made up — they have been gathered from centuries of experience in this area. These principles are, to a degree, like the technical standards of building.
We hope that one day a comprehensive competition law will be drafted and approved, setting out the duties of all state and public bodies in holding competitions and explaining the precise method of the work. Until that day, the responsibility falls upon each of our consciences to act, in whatever station and role we hold, by our duty — free of cosmetic, unreal expediencies and personal interests.
