I was born in 1317 in a neighborhood of Tehran that no longer exists in the form I knew it — or rather, it exists transformed, as all old neighborhoods eventually are, into something that retains the street plan and some of the names while losing the texture of daily life that gave those names their meaning. The neighborhood was called Navab. The street where we lived was Kucheh Qorbani, and it gave onto Kucheh Nad-Ali, which was the social center of our world for the years of my childhood and early adolescence.
My father was a craftsman. My mother kept the house with the systematic attention that women of her generation brought to domestic order — an attention that I would later recognize, having spent my life thinking about architecture, as a form of spatial intelligence. She knew the dimensions of every room. She understood the way light moved through the windows over the course of a day. She organized the household according to principles that were intuitive rather than theoretical but were no less rigorous for that.
The house itself was a traditional Tehran courtyard house — a type that has mostly disappeared from the city, replaced by apartment buildings of varying quality. The rooms arranged themselves around the central courtyard, which contained a pool and a plane tree of considerable age. In summer, the family slept on the roof, under the stars, with the sounds of the neighborhood rising from below. In winter, we gathered in the room closest to the korsi — the low table with the brazier beneath it, around which the entire household would sit in the evenings, legs stretched under the quilted cover, warm at the extremities and cold at the shoulders.
Our corner of Navab was a world in miniature, complete with its own social hierarchy, its own geography of public and private space, its own cast of characters who recur in my memory with the vividness of figures in a novel. There was the Nad-Ali family, for whom our alley was named — a large family of brothers who occupied several of the adjacent houses and who collectively constituted a kind of informal local authority. There was Momad Tabrizi, who kept a small shop near the alley entrance and who knew everything about everyone, as small-shop owners in old neighborhoods always do. There was Hassan Kashi — known to all of us as Hassan Rockefeller, for reasons that had to do with a momentary prosperity he had displayed some years before and that everyone remembered with a mixture of admiration and irony.
The children of the neighborhood formed alliances and hierarchies of their own, which shifted constantly according to the politics of the alley. We played marbles in the spring and early summer, when the weather was warm enough to crouch on the ground for hours. We played volleyball in the alley itself, stringing a rope between two houses and dividing into teams whose composition was always disputed. In winter, when the courtyard was cold, we met inside — in the Nad-Ali house mostly, which was large enough to accommodate a crowd.
I began to box at around the age of twelve, at a small gymnasium near the neighborhood that was run by a former fighter of some local reputation. The gymnasium occupied a basement space, reached by steep stairs, with a ring in the center and a few heavy bags along the walls. It smelled of sweat and liniment and the particular dampness of underground rooms. The trainer was a quiet man who communicated mostly through demonstration — he would show you what he meant rather than explain it, and then watch while you tried to reproduce the movement. It was my first experience of learning a physical discipline from someone who had mastered it, and I remember it as formative in ways that only became clear to me much later.
The cinemas of the neighborhood were a defining institution of my adolescence. The Metropol was the grandest — a proper cinema with a lobby and a balcony and a screen large enough to fill your entire field of vision. The Crystal was smaller and showed older films, often American westerns and Indian melodramas whose plots were entirely comprehensible without knowledge of the language. The Diana and the Plaza were neighborhood cinemas in the full sense: places where you went not necessarily to see a particular film but to spend a few hours in the dark, in the company of your friends, in a space that was neither home nor street but something in between.
We went to the cinema two or three times a week during the summers of the mid-1330s. We would see whatever was showing, without prejudice. I remember experiencing, in those basement and balcony spaces, my first encounters with architecture that was not the architecture of everyday life — screen architecture, which is its own peculiar form, a kind of spatial education conducted in darkness, images moving across a surface that was also, somehow, a kind of window into another world's spatial arrangements. I did not know then that I would become an architect. But I think something was being registered in those hours in the dark.
The year 1341 brought the Bouin Zahra earthquake — a disaster that killed thousands in the villages of the Qazvin plain and sent tremors through Tehran that cracked walls and shook the plane tree in our courtyard and woke everyone in the neighborhood before dawn. I remember my mother standing in the doorway of the room in the posture that building code recommends — she had somehow internalized this piece of folk knowledge without knowing its engineering rationale — and my father on the roof, looking toward the mountains, trying to determine from the direction of the sound where the center of the shaking was.
The events of 15 Khordad 1342 arrived in our neighborhood as sounds before they arrived as news. There were distant sounds in the morning — sirens, shouts, what might have been shots — that brought everyone to their rooftops. The Nad-Ali brothers were on their roof. Momad Tabrizi had pulled his shutters closed. By afternoon, the neighborhood had the specific quiet of a place that has decided, collectively, not to know too much about what is happening outside its boundaries. The events of that day changed something in the atmosphere of Tehran that I was aware of as a child without having the language to name it.
I left the neighborhood for good in 1336 when I went to study. I returned to it, over the years, the way one returns to a place whose importance one has come to understand only in retrospect — not looking for what remains of the original, which is very little, but trying to locate, in the changed geometry of the streets, some trace of the spatial intelligence that organized the world of my childhood. What I find, when I look, is the persistence of a certain scale — the human scale of a neighborhood built before the automobile — and certain corner relationships, certain ways that one alley gives onto another, that still carry a memory of the original arrangement.
Architecture is the most public of the arts, and also the most private. The buildings that have shaped me most deeply are not the famous buildings I have studied — though I am grateful to all of them — but the unnamed, unrecorded spaces of the neighborhood where I grew up: the courtyard, the alley, the cinema, the gymnasium in the basement. These are the spaces that taught me, before I knew I was being taught, that architecture is first of all a matter of space and light and the movement of human bodies through both. Everything else came later.