Greetings and a warm welcome to the distinguished guests who have gathered here out of respect for architecture and to honor those architects who strive for the advancement of architecture. I welcome the architects who graciously accepted the invitation of the Grand Award and, by placing their works before the jury, enabled another chapter of contemporary architecture to be evaluated and documented and its trajectory mapped out. I must thank the esteemed jury members who carried out the difficult, meticulous, and highly responsible task of judging with great patience and thoroughness.
I also thank Mr. Mehrdad Yousefi, the respected Managing Director of the company and his colleagues, especially Mr. Mehdi Yousefi, the company's Commercial Director, and Mr. Dourandish, the Director of Public Relations and Advertising, who provided every facility for organizing this year's award ceremony. Likewise, I thank the representatives of all professional, educational, and cultural institutions of architecture, the esteemed government officials, as well as the media representatives who are present here and have, by their attendance, transformed this award ceremony into a grand celebration of architecture.
I also thank the officials of the Abgineh Hall who, like last year, made this venue available to us, and all the staff of the club who helped organize the ceremony so splendidly. And I thank Mr. Behrouz Gharibpour, Director of the Iranian Artists' House, who once again graciously made the Artists' House available for the jury sessions, and finally my colleagues at Memar Nashr Institute, who for more than five months have worked with dedication and sincerity, step by step, to realize this great undertaking precisely according to the predetermined schedule, without the slightest delay or weakness.
The Grand Award of 1381 was dedicated to post-revolution residential architecture. All residential buildings constructed after the Revolution in which the art of architecture, engineering knowledge, and construction technology have been placed in the service of health, safety, comfort, aesthetic beauty of the living environment, family economy, as well as enriching urban architecture and strengthening environmental attachments, were eligible to participate. From the establishment of the Grand Award, we have defined its purpose as follows: supporting progressive, elevating, and exemplary movements in the country's architecture and documenting the developments of contemporary architecture.
Contemporary architecture has one fundamental difference from old architecture: its history is written in its own time. By history, I mean art-historical analysis. Publications, journals, exhibitions, competitions, and awards — with the help of architecture critics — disseminate the latest news about the state of architecture around the world. The birth of every new work is immediately recorded in architectural history. Naturally, initial assessments and judgments are later revised, and day by day, the judgments become more considered and precise, just as art histories written at the end of the twentieth century reflect more mature assessments than those made contemporaneously with the emergence of modern architecture. In any case, what matters is that architectural movements be recorded and documented.
But recording and documenting requires strategy and direction. Despite diverse tendencies and even some deviations in the trajectory of architecture, fortunately, a shared human ideal or a historical destiny draws all architectural events along behind it. No architecture can travel outside this ideal path, and in this journey, it must keep an eye on what lies behind and ahead. The philosophy of evaluating and documenting contemporary architecture lies precisely in this.
We feel that in both the awards of 1380 and 1381, steps have been taken in this direction. In the Award of 1380, which was dedicated to non-governmental works of the second half of the 1370s without restriction to any particular function, 160 works from across the country participated, and from among them, 29 were selected as good examples and 5 as top works. In the Award of 1381, which was dedicated to post-revolution residential architecture, nearly 100 works in categories of single-family houses, apartments, and large complexes participated, and from among them, 20 were selected as good examples and 5 as top works. A detailed report of the jury's deliberations for the 1381 award will soon be published. This is one of the best methods of evaluation and documentation, as the experience and judgment of at least five jurors are applied in evaluating the works and articulating their values.
Over the two rounds we have completed, we have benefited from the perspectives of nine jurors, each with different experience. Evaluation and documentation has its own specific criteria, standards, and particular procedures. The objectives of the award, the definition of work eligible for the award program, how works are presented, the award's coverage of its chosen subject, the competence and comprehensiveness of the jury, the criteria for judgment, the method of evaluation and ranking, and the articulation of values for architects and society — these are all matters that must gradually become codified and institutionalized. In most cases, the working procedures have been determined and finalized, and in some matters, such as expanding the award's coverage and broadening the evaluation system, we still need more experience and experimentation.
We hope to create a network across all provinces of the country that constantly watches for new works, regularly catalogues them, collects the necessary information and documents, and even undertakes a form of preliminary evaluation. Architecture groups of the Provincial Engineering Organizations or active architecture associations in the provinces can assist us in this regard. The Memar Award belongs to the country's architectural community, and it is hoped that with the help of architects themselves, it will become a lasting cultural institution.
The awards of 1380 and 1381 covered sections of post-revolution architecture and brought the efforts of the country's good architects out of the shadows and into the public eye. The goodwill of those involved in the award and the integrity and soundness of the work have attracted society's trust. The architects whose 29 designs were selected by the jury in the Award of 1380 had earned their professional merit through their own effort and endeavor, and what the award did was to bring that merit into public view through measured, reliable criteria. It has not yet been a year since the results of the Award of 1380 were published, and the Pardis Technology Park Foundation has already recommended the selected architects to research companies seeking to construct buildings in the park.
For the evaluation and documentation of post-revolution architecture and, in the next stage, all of Iran's architecture from the 1330s onward — and to help prepare materials for the art-historical study of this period of contemporary Iranian architecture — we need five years of work and several research activities, within the framework of the Grand Award. This will enable us to make several more cross-sections of post-revolution architecture and evaluate and document its progress in various fields. Several research projects can also be dedicated to evaluating the important works and prominent architects of the three decades before the Revolution, for which we hope sponsors will volunteer to provide the financial resources. Other research is also underway elsewhere, particularly research on the beginnings of modern architecture, which we hope will be codified and published as soon as possible.
If we join hands, all of contemporary Iranian architecture can be evaluated and documented within a five-year program, and we can expect that after five years, we will have a clear picture of exemplary works of contemporary Iranian architecture, architects of distinction and their styles, the trajectory of contemporary architectural evolution, and the place of contemporary Iranian architecture in the world.
Thank you for your patience, and I pray to God for your health, success in your endeavors, and a good conclusion.