If in 1355 [1976] someone had asked me what profession I would choose, I would have said I was still not sure — anything but architecture. If the same question had been put to me in 1356 [1977], I would have said: naturally, architecture. This was yet another of those many instances that taught me a person never knows himself well enough. My acquaintance with architecture was entirely accidental and for reasons unrelated to architecture. Without any knowledge of architecture, art, or design, and without the slightest motivation or interest in the field, I attended a private drawing class. To my surprise, I discovered I was quite good at it. My true passion was music, but I had no particular talent for it. I did not like drawing, yet I learned very quickly, and within a few days things had progressed to the point where the school offered to let me continue my studies free of charge. This was the first significant recognition in my life for something I fundamentally did not enjoy. By reading the biographies of great architects and artists, I came under the influence of towering figures like Michelangelo and da Vinci — though they were not happy and led turbulent lives. In those days, I realized there are values in life more compelling than happiness. In any event, thanks to good entrance exam scores and especially a high ranking on the specialized exam for architecture schools, I was surprised to gain admission to several faculties. I enrolled in architecture at the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Tehran. In the years 57 and 58 [1978-79], the only thing that did not matter was coursework. I had no choice but to go to Italy to continue my studies. During the first five years of my stay in Italy, I had a very difficult time. Because the government had declared architecture a frivolous field and did not allow parents to send foreign currency to their children, I was forced to take dozens of odd jobs unrelated to architecture just to make ends meet. Yet my academic record and grades were excellent throughout. In 1985, I found my first job related to my field: scraping correction marks off construction drawings with a razor blade. That day I understood that the profession and the university are two separate worlds. On the job, there was no trace of architectural history, visual perception theory, principles of form composition, or anything I had learned. My ideals in life were other things entirely. My professional situation was such that I had not the slightest hope that even if I survived another 200 years, I could attain the work I dreamed of. I could not sit idly by and watch my professional life be reduced to detailing staircase construction drawings. I had to do something. Together with another architecture student, I decided to create an extracurricular cultural activity at the university that might earn us some recognition. Access to Iranian and Islamic architectural and urban planning resources was relatively easy for us. My great fortune in life was that in my early university years, I had quite accidentally attended the classes of great Iranologists such as Galdieri and Zander.
We chose a topic related to public buildings in Islamic cities. To realize the study project, I effectively set aside an entire academic year. I later realized that "how one graduates" is far more important than "graduating quickly." What had begun as the idea of a small exhibition in a classroom ended up becoming a major exhibition in one of the important historic buildings of Genoa, the publication of a book, and the hosting of an international symposium attended by many of the world's leading experts on Iranian and Islamic architecture. This exhibition earned me some recognition, though its outcome was the opposite of what I had expected. Not the slightest new job offer came my way, but instead the dean of the faculty asked me to write my thesis under his supervision. Edoardo Benvenuto was a structural engineer, musician, philosopher, and scientist, and his area of specialization — the history of structural calculation — had the least connection to architecture. I was thoroughly averse to structural calculation and considered it fundamentally a branch of civil engineering. He wanted me to work on unpublished handwritten treatises by certain seventeenth- and eighteenth-century mechanics scholars, which to me was tantamount to suicide — and rejecting the dean's offer was another form of suicide. Once again, I took refuge in a field where I had a competitive advantage over other students and could say something new: Iranian architecture. Iranian architecture was not in itself a recognized subject, and I had to choose a topic that was fundamentally new and could be proposed to the dean as an alternative. The dean was a very affable person, a rare scholar, and extremely serious and demanding in his work. His exam (structural calculation and its history) was the hardest in the faculty, and hundreds of students had failed it multiple times in succession. After several months of research, I proposed the topic "From Idea to Project in Iranian Architecture, 11th to 17th Centuries" and promised to address the question of possible methods of structural calculation in ancient Iran. This topic was accepted, and after four years of work I was able to identify several interesting first-hand observations regarding Iranian architecture, which my professor later used in his own book on the history of mechanics, proving that the roots of certain structural calculation methods prevalent in medieval Europe had originated in Iran. In any case, at the start of my thesis, I faced a major problem. The architecture office consumed 8 to 10 hours of my day, and I had no time to pursue work, classes, and the thesis simultaneously. The dean, who had presumably learned of my situation through the head of the architecture office where I worked, performed the first and last act of patronage in my life and recommended me to a research institute affiliated with the university and the city of Genoa. It was 1987, and CAD programs that could run on PCs had just come onto the market. Anyone who knew how to use a computer had a huge competitive advantage over others. Our institute, which was funded by the government, had very good computer equipment, but I had not the slightest familiarity with computers. At that time, I was not even allowed to enter the computer operators' room. I was fundamentally not a technology-oriented person and knew absolutely nothing about PCs. In those years, general knowledge in this area was very weak, and hardly anyone knew the difference between a computer and a large calculator. In any event, I asked the head of the company — a clever engineer with connections to the Green Party who, through his ties to the university, the party, and the provincial government, secured urban planning contracts — to let me work with the computer. He reluctantly agreed and assigned an engineer named Giorgio to make sure I did not cause any damage. Giorgio did me one of the greatest kindnesses of my life: with extraordinary patience, over the course of a year, he answered all my questions about computers. That is when I realized that a good colleague teaches you far more than any university. By 1990, I was an engineer and at the same time one of the most proficient CAD operators in the city, and by virtue of this competitive advantage I was easily hired at the office of Renzo Piano. Piano's office was like a Renaissance architecture workshop but with the most advanced technologies of the day. Piano despised computers and preferred to develop his projects through models and sketches. He accepted computers because, unlike beautiful hand drawings, computer drafts were not aesthetically pleasing and thus allowed the designer to focus on the subject of the drawing — architecture itself — rather than the beauty of the drawing. Besides, the design of large and complex structures was possible only with the use of computers. Piano was highly intelligent, affable, eloquent, creative, and unpretentious. The quickest way to get fired from Piano's office was to address him by his surname or as "engineer" instead of Renzo. Working at Piano's office meant forgoing any life outside the office. Every day of the week, including weekends and official holidays, I worked 12 hours a day. Most of the office's architects had very specific and tedious tasks. One person spent two years on a parking ramp, another one year on a basement retaining wall, and another four years on airport toilet designs. Piano's own job was the hardest of all. His family life had fallen apart, and he was constantly traveling from one point of the world to another or attending numerous exhausting meetings. He rested two weeks a year, and during the hours he was in the office, he had to review several projects simultaneously. His fortune was having an excellent administrative and contracts manager and an excellent office manager. The office manager was a Japanese man named Shunji, who on many nights would fall asleep on the office chairs from sheer exhaustion. The office's work resembled work on the deck of a sailing ship. In stormy conditions, hierarchies dissolved, and the most important people, if necessary, performed the lowliest tasks. My job was the three-dimensional computer modeling of complex or kinetic spaces, which was somewhat more interesting than the work of those one rank above me. For this reason, I was transferred from the exciting Kansai Airport project to the worst project in the office — the Fiat factory renovation plan. During my time at Piano's office, I did not learn anything new about architecture, but I became acquainted with the complexity and especially the level of quality and precision required by vast and important projects. Throughout my career, the experience at Piano's office was never directly utilized. All this time, I thirsted for the day when, like the architects whose stories I had read, I could design a building from beginning to end. Until that
day, I had only worked on fragments that, unlike puzzle pieces, did not ultimately form a complete picture in the mind. Since I needed to make a living, I left Piano's office and joined the only other respectable new office that needed me. The staff of this new office numbered 40, and when I joined, about 40 major projects were underway. I was the only architect in the office. The rest were engineers, and the office's work was industrial architecture. Due to fears of project leaks, the office environment resembled a barracks. No one was allowed to move even a single photocopy or piece of paper that did not bear a stamp, number, and signature. The easiest way to get fired from this office was to photocopy one of the project sheets and leave it on your desk for a few hours. For about two years in this office, I designed oil tanks, power stations, power plants, industrial laboratories, warehouses, port facilities, and factories that had not the slightest connection to the question of architecture — but rather to technology, construction practices, and the economics of building. One important lesson I learned from this experience was that professional jealousy in engineering environments is much less than in architecture offices. One of my colleagues was a young engineer whose father, a wealthy and self-made builder named Piana, had a particular fondness for me, believing that my friendship with his pampered son could solve the problem of the boy's haplessness. He was mistaken, but in any case, he commissioned me to design a large number of villas. I, who had always been waiting for such an opportunity to carry out a proper project from start to finish, realized that from the assortment of scattered knowledge I had acquired during my studies or at work, no coherent method or set of principles emerged upon which to base a design. The large office of Engineer Piana had a commercial structure, and the only thing that mattered was economizing on construction and selling the villas at the best price. He had no interest in my laughable concerns about aesthetics and architectural design. Before the project reached its economic and practical conclusion, a political storm swept Italy, and investors, including my employer, withdrew from commercial activity. Italy's economic conditions were dire, and although I was among the few employees who were not laid off, my workload had increased enormously while the quality of the work had declined. Iran's economic conditions and relative prosperity after the war with Iraq were such that we Iranians living abroad imagined our homeland to be a good place to start an attractive professional career. After 13 years, I returned to Iran and promptly realized that in my own country I was like a foreigner. I had not the slightest idea where to begin. Since I had no connections, no patrons, no wealthy father to provide me with my first house, office, car, and project, I had no choice but to settle for a government job with very meager pay. For six months, not a single useful assignment was given to me. The engineers spent their time drinking tea and producing useless reports and charts that reflected the office's unfinished work. During this time, I tried to present proposals that I found interesting to the management — all of which, while not terribly valuable, received great attention, yet none were ever implemented. In late 1372 [early 1994], I found a reasonably good job at a large architectural firm. My first assignment was the preliminary design of a traffic circle that apparently had no solution due to the terrain's irregularities, and the office had been working on it for six months without result. I, as often happens in architecture offices, had three days to present my solution. When I realized that the reason for the previous designs' failure was that a traffic circle was simply not a good solution for this project — that what was needed was a grade-separated intersection — the design was completed quickly. As quickly as I had prepared the preliminary design, the project was built, and a large bridge and grade-separated intersection that I had designed was ready for use in Tabriz a few months later. The design was so well received that the municipality replicated it at several other locations that did or did not need it. There I learned that sometimes designs into whose initial concept the least thought has gone may have the greatest physical impact. The office's main business was urban planning, dealing with regulations, per-capita standards, statistics, and calculations — which I did not like and still do not. So I decided to do something to change my circumstances. Alongside my job, I carried out a few small projects independently. At that time, my greatest difficulty was understanding the behavior of my clients, and I blamed myself for it. Later, when I found clients among international institutions and companies, I realized the problem had not been mine. In any case, with great hardship and very modest income and professional satisfaction, I completed a few small projects and designed a number of larger ones that were never realized. My primary concern was design, but the experience of working at this large firm had taught me that the real issues were finding work, social relations, management, legal matters, organizing the workforce, information distribution, coordination among engineers of different disciplines, accounting, relations with principal and nominal partners, collecting fees, paying salaries, and archiving documents and information. None of these had been taught at university, and to tell the truth, even design had been taught to us as disconnected, incoherent points. Whatever the case, design was the field I loved, and I knew that great passion is the engine of perseverance and the catalyst of talent. The administrative matters of an architecture office generated not the slightest motivation in me. I knew no one, and no one knew me — and in 1373 [1994], for an architect eager to advance, this meant death. Teaching at the university in Iran was one of the easiest things for someone who held a university degree. With my relatively respectable academic and professional experience, I entered the university in the blink of an eye and was surprised to find that my classes were well received by students. I suspected that my success in the university's theoretical courses and thesis had played a role. I thought it might be worthwhile to develop this ability, and that same year my first Persian-language article — a critique of Mirmirian's Iran Academies project — was published in the journal Architecture and Urbanism. I enjoy research but detest writing. I view it like enduring traffic: necessary to reach one's destination, but tedious. Every piece of writing, like traffic on a street, once entered must be continued to the end. The trouble is that writing, like traffic, is slow, and especially its pace is far slower than that of thought. In 1374 [1995], Ms. Beski from Abadi magazine contacted me and said they had been searching for someone like me for two years to write architectural criticism for them. This was one of the most important and influential events of my life. I met her for the first time at the magazine's office, and from then on a collaboration took shape between us
that has continued to this day. Just as I shaped the articles, the articles also shaped me. Since my primary concern was architectural design, I conducted extensive studies on the method of architectural design and authored several articles in this direction. I always believed that my best articles were those I wrote about my curiosities, not subjects I already knew and was certain about. My relative success as an architectural writer was both a professional achievement and a professional defeat. The danger that threatens a novice actor when he succeeds in a particular role is that afterward, only similar roles are offered to him. Similarly, for a long time I could not prove that for me, theory was a means, not an end. One of the reasons I never had a large architecture office was precisely this: no one was willing to imagine me in the role of a design architect. For this reason, in subsequent years, government agencies, important architectural firms, and foreign clients frequently commissioned numerous research projects from me, while my architectural projects were comparatively fewer. None of these tasks required a large office. Even my design work, because I used computers and generally up-to-date equipment, could be done with just one or two assistants. In this way, I moved from a room in my home to a small external office where a few people could work. In 1376 [1997], the Italian embassy entrusted me with a very small project in the Farmanieh garden, which I completed satisfactorily. From then on, I officially served as the technical consultant to this embassy for 9 years, and thereafter continued to carry out various projects for the embassy on an occasional basis. In our profession, clients are connected by an invisible thread. When you draw one toward you, the others follow. Thus, after the Italian embassy, the embassies of the Netherlands, Austria, Japan, Venezuela, Denmark, and Norway also referred projects to me. Concurrently, international institutions like the World Bank and the United Nations, and foreign companies such as Shell, MAN, Festo, Normunion, and Bayer approached me. In 1385 [2006], my small office's workload expanded, and I was forced to secure a second office near the first to manage my projects. That is when I understood that a big office means big headaches. Professional activity usually begins in the home study and then a small office of a few people that is run in an entirely familial manner carries on the same style of work at a slightly larger scale. A large office requires organization, and the division of work within it is entirely different. The stage between a small office of 5 or 6 people and a large office of 30 to 40 people is very difficult. The work of a small office resembles craftsmanship, but a large office (especially those with 100 or more people) is an industry. I knew of limited talents within myself, none of which was management or especially dealing with financial matters. I must confess that even today I cannot count a stack of banknotes without making at least two errors. The growth of my office coincided with the loss of one of my key staff members in a car accident, and under both emotional and professional pressure, I was forced to quickly hire new people. I feel they took advantage of my particular circumstances. The result of this experience was negative in every respect. The office returned to its original staff of 5 or 6. My core colleagues remained those who still work with me. Unfortunately, the massive wave of emigration of young professionals has taken or will soon take all my core colleagues away from me, and here I am forced to grapple with one of the major problems of small offices: the transfer of experience and knowledge from departing staff to new ones. Small offices generally maintain good quality. Staff are paid higher salaries, participate in the whole of the work and are therefore responsible and self-directed, and due to their direct and continuous relationship with the principal and the client, they gain valuable experience. My projects, though limited and small, demanded very high precision, compliance with international standards, the use of advanced equipment, complete fluency in English, frequent business trips to European countries, and exchange and collaboration with prominent foreign engineers and architects. As a result, each of these individuals holds a black belt in their craft, and with the departure of each, a portion of the fruits of years of office work leaves with them. At any rate, I came to realize that not having a large, prestigious office was not a problem for me. My clients, who were mostly foreign, preferred to come to me, and my office was simply a workplace. Large offices I knew needed, beyond technical workspace, administrative space, a space to present a face to the client, and reception areas. In any case, despite lacking elaborate facilities, our clients felt satisfied with our work, and most commissions gave rise to friendships that continue to this day. Life within my small office, which I jokingly call "the forty-page notebook," is like that of a family. Beyond the working relationship, there is a mutual affection and respect among the staff whose value far exceeds the material output of the office. Because I did not have exorbitant overhead costs, I was not compelled to become a project hunter. If professional work was scarce, I devoted more time to writing articles, lecturing domestically and abroad, or teaching at the university. Moreover, with the office, in recent years I have been able to collaborate with several important Iranian firms, including Shirdel and Associates, and foreign firms, including Intertecno, which possesses invaluable experience in the field of office buildings and five-star hotels. From these collaborations, which continue to this day, I have learned an enormous amount that no university could have taught me. Intertecno, with two main branches in Italy and several subsidiary branches in European and African countries, has a particular organizational structure. Intertecno does not want to have a single prominent architect. The director of this company, a very discerning architect and a pleasant individual, believes that conditioning the activity of a large firm upon the style of one prominent figure is economically risky and reduces the firm's versatility. For special commissions, this company entrusts the initial design concept to well-known architects according to the client's taste and needs. Intertecno's work is the technical and contractual development and processing of others' ideas. A good architect rarely possesses the technical design and supervision knowledge for specialized buildings such as airports, train stations, hospitals, hotels, and office buildings. For a project to meet all necessary quality standards, collaboration with a structure like Intertecno is essential. I recall that during work on the Osaka Airport project at Renzo Piano's office, the functional design was prepared by Paul Andreu (designer of Imam Khomeini Airport), who had designed several airports; the structural and mechanical engineering was by Ove Arup; and the interior architecture was by several Japanese firms. Renzo Piano was involved only in the general concepts and key details of the project. My own office, being small, also lacked structural and mechanical engineers, and
could therefore benefit from collaboration with the strongest engineering firms in the country, which meant it could offer better technical quality. Although after nearly 30 years of professional experience (part of which has been recounted in this article) and the experience of collaborating with large, medium, and small offices, I have concluded that a small office is better for me than a large one, I must confess that small offices have one great deficiency that is beyond the capacity of people like me to remedy. In advanced countries, the rights of small offices or even solo practitioners are strongly protected. I remember a day in Italy when one of my clients — who unfortunately was Iranian — refused to pay my fee. I consulted a lawyer, who drafted a letter demanding payment and gave it to me to deliver to the client. The lawyer said my client had two options: either pay your fee within 60 days or declare bankruptcy. Upon seeing the letter, the client immediately wrote the check. To claim my right, I did not even need a contract — it was enough to prove I had performed services for a person or company. In Iran, no such situation exists, and many Iranian clients, from midway through a project, lose interest in paying fees. The disadvantage of a small office is that the designer, the person who seeks projects, and the person who collects fees are all the same individual, which sometimes causes one to feel embarrassed about claiming one's due. On the other hand, clients dealing with large firms feel as though they are dealing with a government agency and become entangled in bureaucracy. Quality in large offices is not always good either. I have sometimes seen large offices of hundreds of people where major projects are completed by a small group in a very short time. These days, some large offices have acquired rankings by force of nominal partners, resume padding, and financial investment, and for this reason have outpaced others in securing government contracts. Through my criticism work and magazine involvement, I have dealt with numerous small offices, and in recent years I have noticed that clients are increasingly willing to entrust their work to these small, young offices that are highly motivated to improve their work quality, and their control over the project production and construction process is far greater than dealing with large architectural firms. Of course, unfortunately, another motivation for clients is that dealing with small offices makes it easier for them to shirk their legal obligations. Today, 35 years after I decided to pursue architecture, I think that if circumstances had been different, I might be doing something else in some other part of the world today. But I can never imagine that I could have been the owner of a large architecture office.
*Kamran Afshar Naderi, a graduate of architecture from the University of Tehran and the University of Genoa in Italy, returned to Iran after seven years of professional practice in Italy, including work at the office of Renzo Piano. He is a university lecturer, and has been a contributor to Memar magazine and a juror of the Memar Award since its inception.