Building Instead of Talking
In most countries, the path toward development is accompanied by a desire on the part of governments and rulers to consolidate and preserve the identity of society. Once the stabilization of security and the economy has been achieved, attention to the importance of civilizational and cultural heritage in the preservation of national identity becomes unavoidable. In most developed countries, institutions such as the national museum, national library, national theatre, national orchestra, and the like — which generally exist as singular entities — become symbols of the national culture of their people. In the early years of the 1350s solar decade in Iran, as a result of massive oil revenues and economic growth, one witnessed an accelerating momentum in the formation of a cultural infrastructure and the reproduction of symbols in accordance with the ideas of that era. Compressing time to create the pillars and structures of culture by relying on large budgets, alongside injecting stimulating agents of culture and art modeled on advanced countries, was among the goals of this program. In the course of this movement, the idea of establishing a national library in the country emerged, and following it, a working group of archival and library specialists was formed for preliminary studies and planning. Subsequently, in 1356, a competition was held to select the executive planning consultant and then the design for the National Library of Iran. Among the invited jury members, Giancarlo De Carlo, the Italian architect and educator, participated in a marathon fifteen-day judging session along with other jury members. He expressed interesting views in an interview given at the time in Domus magazine regarding the works presented in this competition. From his perspective, the projects fell into three groups: exaggerated monumentalism, technological perfectionism, and, finally, an excess of common sense. The first group comprised projects whose architects had been excited by the prospect that petrodollars would allow them to execute the most extreme architectural irregularities. The pretext for these unconventional ideas was naturally local tradition, and what had been taken as Iranian tradition was that portion of Islamic monument-building that had no longer any connection with the real culture and the economic, social, and political context of contemporary Iran. The second group comprised projects whose architects had likewise been excited by the wealth they imagined to exist in this Middle Eastern land, and by the belief that they could meet its needs through ideas drawn from the most remote aspects of the cult of technology. They had not taken notice of the fact that contemporary Iran might have much money to spend, but it undoubtedly lacked the technical capacity to manage such advanced technology. For this reason, the proposed ultra-modern technological solutions would generally have disastrous consequences. The projects of the third group belonged to architects who, out of a kind of inherent modesty or perhaps inability, had used more neutral and inert ideas. The problem was that most jury members, partly out of understandable apprehension at the unconventionality of the first group's designs and the unsuitability of those of the second, turned their attention toward the mediocre offerings of the third group.
As a result, the project to build the National Library of Iran had not been concluded by 1357, and after the Revolution the aspiration for a large library at the national level under the designation "National Library of Iran" was consigned to oblivion. In the late 1360s, the need for a large library under the title of the National Library of Iran — with the practical objectives of an institution responsible for the collection, preservation, and maintenance of the country's written heritage and whatever is produced in this field — was raised once more, and its program was placed before the relevant authorities in 1355 [sic]. In this connection, the review of the existing past program was entrusted to Pirraz Consulting Engineers as a firm with the necessary specialized capacity to meet the client's needs, and then in 1373 the client, revising the previous decision, held a limited competition among five first-tier consulting engineering firms as the method of selecting the preferred consultant. The final result of this competition, with unanimous jury votes, was the re-selection of Pirraz Consulting Engineers as program planner and project designer. The subject of this issue of Memar magazine is Yousef Shariatzadeh, the principal architect of the National Library of Iran at Pirraz Consulting Engineers, and an approach to architecture that has largely remained distant from the center of current architectural activity and attention; the construction of large-scale projects of this kind, with their specialized function, is practically beyond the capacity of Iranian agencies. It is our belief that insufficient attention has been paid to Yousef Shariatzadeh and his place in the contemporary architecture of this country. Much has been written about his projects such as the Rivoli Cinema and the National Library, but not nearly enough about the architect himself and his architecture. Yousef Shariatzadeh was not given to writing and talking. His preference was to express his ideas and thoughts through the architecture he brought into being, reflecting them in his work. In other words, he was not a practitioner of declarative architecture, and he devoted his life and time to designing and building rather than to speaking and taking the stage. Yet this characterization does not seem entirely accurate. "Shariatzadeh is not one to talk or write about himself" (emphasis added). He was never present at any gathering where being seen and attracting attention was the purpose. Perhaps for this very reason he is not remembered as he should be, and his early death, too, is not without its effect. He was well able to write about his thoughts, and occasionally, with his profound knowledge of the profession and his timely understanding of its condition, he subjected contemporary Iranian architecture to critique — his articles are testimony to this. For a fuller acquaintance with his written thought, reading a piece by him in the fifth issue of Elm va Zendegi magazine in 1338, a response to Jalal Al-e Ahmad's critical article on the architecture of the new mosque in Qom in the same publication, may prove worthwhile. On the other hand, Shariatzadeh in his architectural realm is not one for pleasantries and exaggeration. He designs a building for precisely what it must be and what it must do. The very important and valuable point in his architecture is that he had a social conscience in his profession and held himself responsible for what he did; and, in the words of Mohsen Mirheyder (his longtime friend and colleague at Bonyad and Pirraz), "he practices architecture in such a way that the result benefits society." In practice, Shariatzadeh's architecture does not rest on pure formalism, and he believes that the formation of the project's form is achieved through correct and effective architectural solutions. He avoids playing with forms as the goal of architecture. For him, forms must be meaningful and necessary, and thus a merely abstract and theatrical presence of them is not to be found in any of his works. Over the course of four decades, Shariatzadeh and his colleagues at Bonyad and then at Pirraz Consulting Engineers have completed a wide spectrum of architectural projects — from industrial complexes to medical projects, from universities to administrative buildings and ministries, from residential houses and apartments to the banknote printing works — and in all of these projects the importance of the correct functioning of the architectural elements is evident, and it is certainly the result of his correct understanding of the profession and the work he brings to completion, alongside his boundless study and his extensive knowledge in the effective context of his profession, all of which is fully evident in the elevation of architectural quality across the different forms and great variety of his projects. For Shariatzadeh, architecture does not end with building. Monitoring the performance and the reflection of his architectural solutions in the projects he has built matters greatly, and in repeating designs with a similar function over time, he draws on those results.
Studying Shariatzadeh's works, one finds him in the process of shaping and ultimately resolving a project as a pathfinding architect. The harmonious combination of his abilities with the colleagues of the team constituting the Bonyad office and subsequently Pirraz Consulting Engineers has consistently brought them forward as the completers or consolidators of large and sensitive projects such as the National Library, the Summit Conference Building, and the Central Bank banknote printing works. Without doubt, the superior statistics of the many completed projects of Shariatzadeh and his colleagues, compared with those designed but unbuilt, stand as testimony to this claim. Yousef Shariatzadeh is a great architect, but for us he is an architect deserving of respect — perhaps because more than talking at length about architecture, he has left behind good architecture.
Footnotes: 1 — Giancarlo De Carlo, a graduate in Civil Engineering from the Milan Polytechnic and holding a doctorate in architecture, taught at Italian universities, MIT, and Yale University in America. 2 — "Interview with Giancarlo De Carlo," Domus magazine, No. 585, 1978; translated by Soheila Beski, published in Abadi magazine, No. 17, 1374.
Yousef Shariatzadeh, photograph by Ahmad Ali