HOUSE (FROM THE BEGINNING OF THE FIRST PAHLAVI PERIOD TO THE 1960S)
The house can be considered the pulse of architecture and urbanism and even more than that, the pulse of the civil life itself: House is the primary space that should correspond to our demand for a high-quality and meaningful life. It is a long time that our only way of explaining our conception of a ‘Good House’ has been a number of digits, numbers, quantities and functions. For a long time we have considered modernism responsible for this, while the major change that happened to our demands after an encounter with modernity, was a greater desire for comfort. And this was not in contra- diction to the meaning of house. This is why half a century ago one could still come across good houses, while after- wards we have only witnessed the emptying of houses from all kinds of quality and not just a lowering of the quality of housing. This decline happened firstly in our minds and then manifested itself in the actual houses. It is half a century now that we no longer demand quality leading to a quantification of all our measures and criteria. We consider the cause of this decline to be a crisis which has affected us from the 50s: the crisis of urbanization.
Moayero’l mamalek mansion, Tehran
Houses with courtyard, Tehran Luxury edifice Qajar era