When we began preparing this issue of Memar, Iraj Kalantari was alive. We had spent months gathering material, conducting interviews, studying drawings, and reaching out to colleagues and students who had worked alongside him across six decades of practice. The issue was conceived as a tribute to a living architect — an opportunity to examine, while he was still present to respond, the body of work that has made him one of the most consequential figures in Iranian modernism.
On the second of Esfand, 1401, Iraj Kalantari passed away at the age of eighty-five. What was planned as a tribute became an elegy.
We have chosen to publish the issue as originally conceived, with as few changes as possible. The interviews remain in the present tense; the analysis of his buildings assumes a continuing practice; the photographs of his recent houses — the Beshaarat Villa in Damavand, the Rahnamaa House in Isfahan — show spaces still being lived in, still accumulating the particular warmth of habitation. This is deliberate. Kalantari's architecture is not a closed chapter. It continues to exist in the world, to shelter families, to teach — silently, persistently — what it means to design with structural honesty and spatial generosity.
The texts gathered here approach his work from several directions. Some are scholarly assessments of his methods and influences. Others are personal recollections — architects and critics who knew him, studied under him, or simply encountered him at moments that proved formative. Still others are his own words: the patient, precise articulations of a man who had spent a lifetime thinking about the relationship between structure and space, between Eastern opacity and the transparency of the modern West.
Kalantari belonged to a generation of Iranian architects who came of age during a period of enormous cultural ferment — men and women who had studied in Europe and returned to a country in rapid, sometimes violent transformation, who had to negotiate between the inheritance of Persian spatial tradition and the imperatives of an international modernism that arrived with its own certainties and its own blind spots. He navigated this tension with unusual subtlety, never resolving it into a formula, always keeping it alive as a productive friction in his work.
We are grateful to Sanam Kalantari for her trust and generosity during the preparation of this issue; to Bahram Shokouhian for his careful documentation of the work; to Siamak Asadi and the team at Khanchchi; and to the architects and engineers at Bavand Consulting Engineers, who worked with Kalantari through many of the projects discussed here. Without their assistance, this record would be far poorer.
To Iraj Kalantari: architect, teacher, and witness to a century — thank you.