The present state of our architecture is, more than it is deviation, wandering, disorientation or lack of programme, stagnation and marking time; and we should not make the conditions that brought it about seem unduly complicated. It may well be that the way we first adopted the new architecture, the way our schools of architecture were founded, and the way we have attended to the heritage of past architecture are all open to criticism — and each in its place deserves to be addressed. But the plain, obvious fact that should not be hidden from view or misinterpreted is this: the forty-year effort of adopting the new architecture, which began explicitly with the founding of the first school of architecture at the University of Tehran, was halted by the victory of the Islamic Revolution, and that halt still continues.
The Islamic Revolution was a fundamental turn against the political and cultural dominance of the West, and it naturally regarded the record of the borrowing of Western learning and culture with suspicion. That suspicion in turn made the continuing activity of the universities — the schools of architecture among them — precarious. Although the schools of architecture have no significant share at present in transforming world architecture, they remain the most effective institution for transmitting and disseminating its achievements. Our own schools of architecture are no exception to that general rule. Nor does the global quality of knowledge and teaching require universities to close their doors to the exchange of achievements. This is especially so because, in the development and spread of new knowledge and the role universities play in it, we are still receivers and have not yet become givers.
Setting aside the particular history by which the adoption of modern architecture coincided with the rise of the Pahlavi dynasty and its deliberate policies of linking modernity to a pre-Islamic ancient past — modelled on the Hellenism of the Renaissance, and seeking to liken our Islamic history to the Christian Middle Ages — and setting aside the instructive turn by which, in the last decade of that same dynasty, the ground was laid to redress that distortion and to move from a pre-Islamic to a post-Islamic orientation (as the real course of the development of Iranian architecture and the nature of the dialogue between modern architecture and historical heritage required): in any case, the establishment of modern architectural education in Iran was a one-way current from outside in, and any greater expectation would have required a longer time. We have possessed an enormous historical heritage; but architecture transmits and spreads itself less through theory and historical-cultural argument than through the direct offering of its products and the technology that goes with them.
Apart from the few Iranian architects of the late Qajar period who had travelled to Europe and, with a free approach far from political bias, undertook the first experiments of Iranian taste in adopting the new Western architecture, the wide entry and acceptance of the new architecture came first through the buildings needed by the new urban institutions, designed by European architects and then by Iranian architects trained in the West, and afterwards — and most of all — through the teaching of the new architecture in the schools of architecture.
The School of Architecture at the University of Tehran was, on the whole, a serious school and the main centre of contact with developments in world architecture and of drawing back distinguished Iranian graduates from various countries; and apart from that, in later years only two other schools of architecture came into being, neither of which was ever able to compete with it, and there was no possibility of further expansion of the discipline.
Up to the middle of the Forties (the Seventies by the Western reckoning), while the flag of modern architecture was still flying, there was in Iran too no other claim than the transmission and spread of that same architecture; the school pursued the same mission. But modernism and the international style of architecture, along with their own global expansion, in turn drew in the cultures and traditions of non-Western peoples and their people and talents. In the Forties we too witnessed the presence of architects who, although they were fully the product of the West, in line with the reaction that the worldwide spread of modern architecture had itself provoked, placed the good examples they had seen in the West — each in his own way — in the service of Iranising modern architecture and of internationalising Iranian architecture. The new Iranian architecture was gradually gaining the strength to take part in world architecture and to have representatives of its own. The presence of just these few transformed the school and drew the attention of other intellectual fields to architecture.
With the victory of the Islamic Revolution, the need to reconsider the condition of the universities that led to the Cultural Revolution, and the aggravating political circumstances, our architecture's link with the world was severed — and this precisely in a period of architectural change in which building technology was crossing new thresholds and the spirit of revisionism in modernism had taken hold everywhere. It was during that same period that young architects from the Third World found their chance to come forward, and Iranian graduates abroad also took some share in that coming-forward.
In any case, we lost twenty years of opportunity, partly inescapably and partly avoidably. Twenty years is no small span of time, the more so in conditions in which the pace of change has multiplied. No fresh force entered the schools of architecture, while across the country we set up several times as many schools as we had at the time of the Revolution.
To remedy the ill it is better to face the problem with the same simplicity with which it occurred, and not to make it needlessly complicated. We have lost time; we must accept the damage. The way to repair the damage is greater investment and greater effort: to take the schools of architecture seriously again; alongside well-known good architects at home and abroad, to invite distinguished graduates from outside the country to the schools of architecture; to give those who have the capacity to run the schools of architecture and the necessary record and qualifications a free hand in planning; to re-establish contact with the intellectual and practical currents of world architecture; to make the environment of the schools active and attractive — and to be assured that architecture carries such attraction in itself and is absorbed into the country's economy and penetrates world culture so rapidly that whatever we invest we shall harvest several times over, and quickly.