From this issue on, “New Seeds” appears with a different arrangement from previous issues. The section aims to let students and young architects raise questions of teaching, university and practice in these pages. Memar therefore welcomes collaboration from all students and young architects in preparing material on educational and professional concerns, translations, interviews with Iranian teachers and practitioners on teaching and on gaining professional experience, presentations of outstanding works and theses, and any other matters they themselves wish to raise.
With Hooman Talibi, Reza Jafarinejad and Reza Hesami.
University teachers of design usually apply very different foundations, and, as Mr. Afshar Naderi put it, the method is mostly trial and error. How, in your view, should architectural design be taught so that the theoretical foundations of design are not left out?
Look — when you say “teacher,” one has to ask what you mean by teacher. Someone who teaches architectural design must have his own theoretical foundations, must have worked with them and tested them over time. Otherwise a school of architecture is meaningless. A teacher cannot teach a body of theory he has not himself arrived at and formulated. Today students or anyone interested can pick up theoretical positions from the internet; but if someone is to teach those foundations he must be their author — they must have come out of his own work. The architecture teacher is not like an internet portal handing you the theoretical foundations of other teachers. Eisenman teaches theoretical foundations in class and his projects over the course of the semester work on those foundations. Eisenman does not present Libeskind's theoretical foundations; and I, when I teach, do not present anyone else's. The only reason I hold the title of teacher is the theoretical foundations I have arrived at in my own work — no other.
Look at your own curriculum. In the whole of the twelve semesters there are no two clearly defined courses directly tied to the teaching of design foundations. And this is not peculiar to Iran — I have taught in fifteen or sixteen different schools in every corner of the world, and in none of them are the foundations of architecture and the method of design set out as such.
I should add that the teaching of architecture in Iran is wholly severed from the teaching and experience of past Iranian architecture. From the moment architectural teaching in Iran became academic, it has been framed in terms of “style,” and theoretical foundations have been left aside. The assumption seems to have been that there is a discipline called architecture, whose content is known; we must find that known thing and teach it, so that architects are trained to practise. That assumption wants no theoretical foundations, and for that reason no architecture school in Iran has ever set itself up as a school of thought.
You mean our schools have never put forward a school of thought?
Well — at the University of Tehran's architecture faculty in Mr Seyhoun's time a school of architecture was put forward that blended the architecture of a particular Islamic-era period with modernism, and some results came out of that method, both in Seyhoun's own work and in the work of those who worked with him. The Azadi Tower by Mr Amanat is an example of that way of thinking; it is still active in Iranian architecture. In my own view, however, the fusion of those two architectures is a kind of eclecticism, because they belong to two different philosophical frameworks. Another view was put forward in Iran by Mr Ardalan, Ms Bakhtiar and their collaborators in The Sense of Unity — and it is clear what that view is. But no particular school to which one can point as established in Iran has come into being, and this has crippled both architectural education and professional practice. Neither has a well-defined framework or direction. For this reason contemporary Iranian architecture gropes blindly for an identity and remains stuck in questions of “style.”
Is it possible for a school of architecture to emerge in Iran?
Why not? The work has to be done both in the schools of architecture and in professional practice. I think what I am raising is clear. The President said, at the conference of building engineers, “The disarray in architecture that we have seen in our own architecture over the past 150 years is a sign of the disarray in the civility of the society.” The President is not an architect but he is a thinker, and the figure of 150 years is, I think, very accurate. For 150 years the architecture of this land has been set aside in the form it used to have — a form that, I am convinced, had its theoretical foundations. Architectural ideas have come in from the West second-hand and jumbled; their surface has been taken up and those surfaces have been used as “styles.”
The usual way of teaching design in our schools is to work on a building of a specific programme each semester. How effective is that?
Well, in that way you run into the particular problems of one project — say, in a hospital design, the programme and the relations among its parts. Those should of course be addressed in a hospital. But the problem of architecture is not that. Design method is a different matter. You spend one semester on a hospital, another on a historical-context project, and so on; these are all matters of a specific physical brief. But if an architect were asked one day to design something other than these buildings, what would he do? You cannot teach every type of building in the university. In that curriculum you acquire information about how a hospital is done — fine, that is one thing; but architectural design foundations are something else.
It often looks as if student projects simply produce a stack of pictures — especially projects influenced by recent movements in architecture — in which a clear idea is not visible. Why is that? Are the pictures on their own enough for us to claim we have grasped the spirit of the age?
I think that is precisely not grasping the spirit of the age. To begin with, one cannot apply, here and in this form, the architectural debates that exist or are emerging in the West, because the intellectual foundations, the school of thought behind them, have not come into being here; they cannot be used merely as tools. The schools formulated over there belong to a philosophical thought and trajectory that exist there and do not exist here.
A common topic, both in the universities and in the profession, is our own architectural history. You have said in an earlier interview that you learned a great deal from the architecture of Isfahan. Could you explain that a little more?
I learned a great many things from the architecture of Isfahan. Its foundations, or its spatial organisation, are extremely advanced and interesting; I still believe there are many points in it I have not yet grasped, and there is much to ponder and study, which can be used in today's architecture. That architecture handles extraordinarily well the question of a space of ta'vil — interpretation or allegorical space. Many architects, even non-Iranian ones, have learned from it. In Iran's profession and teaching, however, attention has been paid mostly to the surface of Iranian architecture, and its important spatial insights have largely been forgotten. You cannot see and understand the architecture of Isfahan through a rationalist lens, because it was not invented, designed or built through that lens. It belongs to another world-view; its framework of thought is the philosophy and wisdom of Iran and Islam. We have to know the world this architecture describes — that is, we have to understand its philosophical framework. The space the architecture of Isfahan produces is an allegory of nakoja-abad (no-place), a counterpart in some ways of the Western Utopia; a space that describes man's place in that world. Today's Iranian architecture, in my view, must take that seriously. The surface of that architecture carries important meanings too — the question of Isfahan's colour, for example, has entirely specific foundations; the courtyard of the Iranian mosque is a distinct spatial category in which you never stand at the centre, which is to say that this architecture describes a world whose centre is not occupied by the human being. That view is entirely different from the Renaissance or rationalist outlook. If we want to imagine a direction for today's Iranian architecture we must first grasp the knowledge we once had. The spaces we make today are certainly not richer than those spaces — which is not to say we should repeat them.
One thing whose absence is felt in the teaching of design is the design of space itself. Can space be taught?
At the very least this is a matter of syllabus. Our universities stress the functional relationships of the building, which of course are important in their own right; but functional relations cannot be separated from the spatial understanding and the spatial idea of the building. In Iran you can see many projects whose functional relations have been laid out on a neoclassical plan but which are, architecturally, an imitation of traditional architecture. Traditional Iranian architecture and a neoclassical plan cannot be fused in one project, one building, or even one culture. The functioning of space has to rest on the spatial idea of that architecture. In the old architecture of Iran the connection held; function and space did not have two separate foundations. Research has been done, for instance, on what the geometric centre of a building meant in old Iranian architecture and how it differs from European or Japanese architecture. Every project raises the question of the centre, and one must therefore see what one is doing with it, since it plays an important role in spatial organisation. Bringing the organisation of the physical programme into agreement with the spatial organisation is the next question, and it matters greatly.
Grasping space in a project that is still on paper, not yet built, is a difficult thing. Mr Afshar Naderi believes that one must study the design process to judge this. How, in your view, can one read architectural space in unbuilt work?
The question of space is first posed abstractly, before it is sensed or experienced. If a project has been designed on the basis of theoretical foundations of space, that is a particular case. If it has been designed on the basis of successive surfaces — of the kind so abundant in Iranian architecture, as in moqarnas — that is another space. Past Iranian architecture was not after the description of a perspectival space; it formed itself mainly out of successive surfaces. Not because its makers knew nothing of perspective — perspective does occur, in a few cases, in Iranian architecture, especially Iranian urbanism. Still, the spatial idea of a project can be seen and understood from its different elements, as one would read a plan.
What would you advise students about working in architectural practices?
What I said at the start about the university applies to offices too. Offices whose work has direction and principles can clearly be useful to students. Offices differ of course — in one you may learn the theoretical foundations of design, in another the technical and executive aspects.
What should students pay more attention to in studying works of architecture?
They must work directly on architecture so that they grasp its foundations. They must redraw works of architecture through direct analysis of their real space. As I said at the start, one of the subjects that is not taught here is architecture. Architecture can only be learnt from other architects — directly and through architectural means alone.
As a last question: Sverre Fehn, in an interview with Record, said that over his working life he had come to understand the importance of “story” in architecture. What have you come to understand during these years that you did not know at the beginning?
I have nothing like Sverre Fehn's experience — I have been practising for only twenty-five years — but the thing I have come to understand is this: in architecture one must empty space rather than fill it. And now I have a question of my own for Memar: what is that empty space for?
Which of your teachers had a special influence on you?
I was Libeskind's student, and in a general sense I learned the foundations of my work and my architectural thinking from him. Another important thing I learned from him is that an architect must have his own way of thinking.