The publication of part 8 of the Encyclopaedia Iranica's architecture entry, written by Mr. Nader Ardalan on architecture in the Pahlavi era after the Second World War, has provoked objections among Iranian architects both inside and outside the country. Because raising those objections without knowledge of the content of the Iranica article would have been of no use, we are publishing the full translation of it and asking everyone who has any critique or view of it to send their critique or view to the magazine with reference to the text of the article.
The Pahlavi era, after the Second World War
Between the end of the Second World War and the fall of the Pahlavi regime in 1979, Iran's ancient and densely traditional culture was exposed to the currents of contemporary development — chiefly to the highly scientific and empirical world of the West. The transformative forces, and the architectural and urban transformations that resulted, can be considered in the present study in three distinct but interconnected periods, each marked principally by particular socio-economic conditions, by national development plans, by aesthetic expressions, by social symbols, and by the issues arising from rapid and intense growth.
The first period concerns the years from the abdication of Reza Shah in 1941 and the start of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi's reign up to the so-called White Revolution of 1962-63. The second period covers architectural activities and achievements in Iran from 1963 to the world energy crisis of 1973. And the last period treats the six-year explosion of construction that followed the OPEC oil-price rise, ending abruptly with the close of that national construction cycle on the fall of the Pahlavi dynasty.
Period One (1941-1963)
This era of fresh contact with the West had three phases: first, the war years, marked by the Allied military occupation of Iran; second, the post-war years up to 1952-54, the years of Mossadegh's premiership; and finally the period after nationalisation up to 1962-63, during which the monarchic regime consolidated its economic and political power. This was an era of national renewal. After the end of direct foreign occupation, with the emergence of a fresh sense of national identity and the setting of national development goals, nationalism was given a new lease of life. As early as 1947, those goals were organised into national development plans. Although the First Seven-Year Plan, which founded the Plan Organisation, was left incomplete because of the economic and political crisis caused by the nationalisation of oil in 1954, the Second Seven-Year Development Plan, running through 1963, exercised a direct influence on the scale and character of architectural activity in the country.
Notable features of the first period included industrialisation, infrastructural development, the equipping of the army, and the new balance of power that followed. The oil industry, for example, grew rapidly, and great attention was paid to investment in dam-building and hydroelectric stations, the building of road networks, telecommunications, and so on. The Marshall Plan and the United States' Point Four programmes, along with other financial, technical, and military aid programmes from the United States and its allies, brought about Iran's first major encounter with the people and culture of the United States; and that relationship took, almost overnight, the place of relations with Germany and France that had grown after the First World War.
Given the stagnant economy and the necessities of post-war reconstruction, only a token attention to architecture and urbanism was possible. This era produced only the symbols of a rising national identity: images of a glorious past such as newly built or rebuilt mausolea of scholars, poets, and national heroes, and images denoting a new order, such as the squares with statues of the national leader at their centre that appeared everywhere. The monumental buildings of this era — built mostly before the Second World War — were often small, with artistic designs and good execution, evidence of the Parisian education of Iran's pre-war designers (the mausoleum of Avicenna at Hamadan, by Seyhoun).
These designers, returned from the École des Beaux-Arts, established Iran's modern school of architecture education at the University of Tehran under the direction of the French architect-archaeologist André Godard. Houshang Seyhoun and Mohsen Foroughi were its first heads. Until the change of management in the early 1970s, the school of architecture, with the classical Beaux-Arts curriculum now transferred into an Iranian setting, trained a generation of French-Iranian architects. The aesthetic character of the architectural ideas and attitudes for public buildings is best described as 'Aryan monumentality', also drawing on Islamic arabesques. Only Mehrabad Airport (Mohsen Foroughi with his Swedish consultants), the Senate building in Tehran (Heydar Ghiai), and the National Iranian Oil Company headquarters (Aziz Farmanfarmaian) managed to draw the attention of the public — suddenly faced with an entirely different scale, function, technology, and construction. Although these were notable buildings, they never reached the level of high architecture.
Apart from these examples, the bulk of construction activity at that time was in private hands. The state of domestic architecture expresses these transformations more clearly. The single-storey, inward-looking courtyard house is the dominant form of Iran's urban dwelling. The concept of the inward house with a 'paradise-like courtyard' — shaped by the system of the extended family, by the social precepts of Islam, and above all by adaptation to a hot, dry, and harsh climate — was, until the Second World War, the natural type of dwelling on the Iranian plateau. These houses were typically built of brick and adobe by local builders called memars. The interior of the houses was traditionally furniture-less and intended for sitting on a carpeted floor. Rooms were assigned to the multi-functional activities of sleeping, dining, study, and recreation. Climatic conditions allowed the courtyard to serve as a private outdoor space. The remarkable design capacity for natural use of solar energy in the traditional house contributed to this (A. Qezelbash and F. Abouzia, Yazd's Courtyard Houses, Tehran 1984). Therefore the dense aggregation of houses into clusters representing social units, organised within urban precincts designed for the pedestrian and called mahalleh (quarters), was the residential and social pattern. At the centre of these quarters appeared a mosque, a bath, a bazaar, and sometimes a place for religious gatherings such as a tekkiyeh.
Through this first period of contact with the West, that primary building unit of urban dwelling was transformed. Although the courtyard house remained the most popular and accessible type of housing, its essential interior workings were seriously disrupted. The introduction of furniture into many houses after the Second World War, and consequently the demand for single-function rooms — such as a dining room and a sitting room — had a direct and lasting effect on the original plan of the house. The first reaction of the more 'urbanised' inhabitants, the pioneers of this change, was to introduce a two-part division of the house: the furnished part was kept for guests or visiting strangers, while the carpeted part suited to traditional living remained for informal family gatherings and the private activities of women and children.
In addition, with rising urbanisation, two types of European housing — initially common in Tehran in the 1930s, namely the upper-storey apartment, and the row-house aligned to right-angled streets for vehicular traffic — became annexes of the contemporary city. Those who could afford it fled the growing urban centres and built villas in the suburbs in the form of a 'lost paradise', in imitation of the nineteenth-century Qajar palaces, set in gardens of various sizes. The residential buildings of the high-income classes gave rise to a 'traditional modern' style — an eclectic tendency to bridge past and present that was not always architecturally successful.
For most Iranians, the closest contact with Western aesthetic symbols came through roads, bridges, and products such as the automobile, the radio, the refrigerator, the telephone, and above all through the films of Hollywood. The image of the Western way of life, together with its accompanying technology, was firmly established by the late 1950s, when the imitation of that lifestyle had become common in most Iranian urban dwellings. Although Iranians lacked the resources to attain that lifestyle properly, the urban elite and the ruling system devoted all their efforts to overcoming this evident contradiction between aim and means.
Period Two (1963-1973)
The first period — marked by infrastructural facilities and monuments that reflected the national need for a renewed sense of cultural identity — though it produced no remarkable public building or interesting urbanism, did succeed in creating a sense of stability. At the same time, the country was entering a period of new prosperity. Iran's oil trade, exchanged for foreign goods and services, was established, and tourism as a major industry was expanding. Domestic and foreign tourism rose every year. Organisationally, the country had achieved an effective bureaucracy. In the Third Development Plan (1963-68), satisfactory support for the construction of health and educational facilities began. Through the Fourth Plan (1968-73) new urban settlements were built and existing ones upgraded. New master plans and the construction of large public buildings formed an important part of state policy.
In the mid-1960s, the return of the first wave of foreign-educated specialist architects and engineers to Iran left a direct mark on national planning and on building capacity. At the same time, the dominant cultural force in the schools of architecture and engineering shifted from French dominance to Anglo-American leanings, with some Italian influences. Daryush Mirfendereski and Mehdi Kowsar — both Italian-trained Iranian architects — succeeded one another at the head of the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Tehran. At the same time, the School of Architecture at the National University of Iran in Tehran was founded.
Iranian specialists, both foreign-educated and those newly trained at home, lacked the necessary information about the country's vernacular architectural heritage and the traditional technical know-how of building. Whatever incomplete knowledge there was had been produced by foreign scholars, with all the inherent limitations of their orientalising and largely archaeological approach (a major exception being the lasting work of A. Pope and P. Ackerman, whose A Survey of Persian Art, first published in 1938, exercised a fresh influence with its early-1960s reprint). It was in response to this need that documentation was added on authentic Iranian cultural values and value systems, and the metaphorical nature of Iranian expression in the visual, aural, and literary arts was made plain (see N. Ardalan and L. Bakhtiar, The Sense of Unity: The Sufi Tradition in Persian Architecture, Chicago 1973; M. Tavassoli, Architecture in the Hot, Arid Zone, Tehran 1974; R. Beny and H. Nasr, Persia, Bridge of Turquoise, Toronto 1975).
While the first high-rise apartment towers were being built in Iran's urban centres, traditional Persian music — through the Centre for Traditional Music attached to the Ministry of Culture — was supported by the state and increasingly appreciated by sections of the public. In architecture, the traditional yellow brick (originally a square of about 24 cm side and 4 cm height, now in standard Western dimensions of 20×7.5×10 cm) regained its rightful place among Iran's building materials, while the arch, vault, dome, and other traditional architectural elements were used as appropriate to clothe entirely contemporary functions. So, for example, the Iran Centre for Management Studies — founded by H. Lajevardi and designed by N. Ardalan — was named in the traditional academic language a madrasah, even as it offered the new business-administration curriculum of Harvard.
Among the building achievements of this era one may name the educational institutions and health services built in the larger cities, and recreational and athletic centres such as sports complexes. The Aryamehr Sports Complex in Tehran, built between 1968 and 1972 by Aziz Farmanfarmaian and Associates (designer: N. Ardalan) for the Ministry of Construction and Housing, brought to mind the Elamite ziggurat of Tchoga Zanbil and the Hundred-Column Hall of Persepolis. The project transformed 200 hectares of barren alluvial land into green space suited to leisure activities. Drawing on existing road-building know-how, more than four million cubic metres of earth were moved and compacted to build a 100,000-seat earthen stadium clad in yellow brick that simultaneously functioned as a dam holding an artificial lake in the adjacent excavated hollow. The lake was both a reservoir for the irrigation of 160 hectares of plantings and a venue for recreational boating, and was itself a focus for many other sports and leisure facilities. This sports complex was the venue of the 1972 Asian Games and has also been used as a setting for national ceremonies.
The Shahyad monument, built in 1971 in connection with the 2,500th anniversary of the Iranian monarchy, was a continuation of the Beaux-Arts monuments that pursued an emphasis on cultural identity. In the building, designed by the Iranian architect H. Amanat, an attempt was made to bind together three important periods of Iranian history — the parabolic Sassanid arch of Ctesiphon and the Islamic pointed arch — in a new construction of cement and travertine. The building, designed in the tradition of the Roman triumphal arch, contains a museum and is regarded as the symbolic gateway from the present international airport to the capital. In future, when the new international airport south of Tehran is in operation and Shahyad's gateway function is gone, its true urban value will become clear.
In this period important conservation and restoration work on historic monuments was carried out in Iran's major cities. After 1964, when the National Organization for the Conservation of the Historic Monuments of Iran (NOCHMI) and IsMEO (the Italian Institute for the Middle and Far East) began the restoration of the Ali Qapu, Chehel Sotun, and Hasht Behesht palaces, special attention was directed to Safavid-era architecture in Isfahan. This programme led not only to the restoration of these historic buildings but also to the publication of numerous books on their architectural details, and to an effort to train artisans and technicians with specialist skills. After that, many other historic buildings were transformed. These changes began in Isfahan (for example, the old caravanserai attached to the seventeenth-century Chahar Bagh madrasah was converted into the Shah Abbas Hotel) but soon extended to Shiraz and the holy cities of Mashhad and Qom. In these cities important building complexes were restored and artistic traditions revived. By 1973, 600 important buildings were on the restoration list, with 200 of them seriously under repair.
In 1964 the American consulting engineers Victor Gruen and the consulting engineers Aziz Farmanfarmaian in Tehran, under the direction of the Iranian urbanist Fereidoun Ghaffari, jointly took up the preparation of a 25-year phased master plan for Tehran, which was completed in 1968 (see Honar va Memari 5, March-May 1970). This model was repeated by other urbanists for all the major cities of Iran. A major factor in these plans was the urbanisation of the rural population. In 1964, about 60 to 65 per cent of Iran's population was rural and 35 to 40 per cent urban. As part of the government's general programme to industrialise Iran rapidly, urbanists were asked to prepare cities to reverse those proportions in the 1980s. More than sixty thousand rural points scattered across the most thinly populated regions of the Iranian plateau were to be merged into 800 super-villages operating on the principles of mechanised agriculture. The aim was to give the population better access to educational, health, and trading services, but the great effort needed and the problems arising from displacing millions of villagers were never properly understood.
Re-examining the master plans prepared, we see that they reflect their designers' Western training and the motives of their state clients (see 'The New City of Aryashahr, Isfahan,' by Soviet urbanists in Honar va Memari 39-40, March-June 1977). One important matter — the traditional patterns of urban settlement of this region, which represent correct adaptation to the environment and a link to the indigenous culture of the majority of the population — has very rarely been considered in the design of new towns. By contrast, wide vehicular avenues have cut, in decisive lines, through traditional dwelling patterns and the dry, barren lands around historic cities, with the aim of preparing the city for a population explosion. As a result, urban land prices around these routes rose by approximately 250 per cent between 1966 and 1971. Instead of social or cultural benefits being the first major fruit of the new master plans, land speculation followed. Before any all-round examination of the now nearly fixed patterns of the urbanism concepts at hand — concepts that had paid attention to effective social plans, to environmentally compatible transport systems, to building types in keeping with culture, and to access to material resources — a dangerous explosion of construction had begun.
In 1972 the shortage of materials and the rapid rise of prices led to a six-month ban on construction in Tehran. But this was only part of the issues that arose in the third and final phase of the history of modern architecture in Iran.
Period Three (1973-1979)
In 1974 the Second International Congress of Architects, with the title 'Toward a Quality of Life', was held. This gathering, presided over by the Iranian architect Mohsen Foroughi, brought together leading world architects and urbanists such as Buckminster Fuller and José Luis Sert from the United States, Kenzo Tange from Japan, and many others, to assess Iran's progress in response to the challenges it faced with the rise in oil prices. The participants in this congress (and the previous one, held in 1970 under the title 'The Confrontation between Tradition and Technology') prepared a Habitat Bill of Rights — drafted by José Luis Sert, Moshe Safdie, B. K. Doshi, Georges Candilis, and Nader Ardalan — for the Ministry of Construction and Housing, and Iran presented this book at the United Nations Habitat Conference in Vancouver, Canada, in 1976. Participants in the international Iran conference came together again in 1977 to judge the international competition for the design of the National Library of Iran. That competition had the largest number of domestic and international entrants of any world competition (see Honar va Memari 45-46, April-July 1978).
As these events reflect, Iran consciously drew on the highest levels of expertise and technology in the world in the late 1970s. But, with all this attention (and at times perhaps because of it), architecture and urbanism between 1973 and the 1979 Revolution rapidly reached a peak — and fell off the edge faster still. The plans prepared for several educational and cultural institutions had been developed under the direction of Iranian architects working with international specialist groups (see Visions of the Body of Iran: Elements of Destiny, by R. Beny, Toronto 1978). Several major contracts were signed with leading international architects, such as the Tehran Hotel (Kenzo Tange), the renovation of the Glassware Museum (Hans Hollein), and a museum in Shiraz (Mansilla).
In the field of urbanism, large-scale new development projects were prepared for the outskirts of most major Iranian cities: the Shahrestan of Abbas-Abad by the international firm Llewelyn-Davies under Jaquelin Robertson (in Honar va Memari 32, April-July 1976); the Pardisan Ecological Park for the Department of the Environment under Eskandar Firouz, designed by the Mandala Group and WBCA; and New Shushtar by Kamran Diba; and several other projects also began (see 'The new city of Bandar Shahpour,' by Mandala Group and WBCA, in Design for Arid Regions, by J. Golany, New York 1983; 'Nuran, City of Light,' by Mandala International under Nader Ardalan, in Contemporary Architects, ed. Muriel Emanuel, New York 1980).
Restoration and conservation activities continued to receive state support, and important conferences were held on the conservation of whole historic precincts. The level of artistic and craft work among artists and craftsmen — plasterers, brick-layers, tile-makers, carpenters, and metal-workers — saw a marked improvement, and their numbers grew.
If we attend to the history of architecture and urbanism in Iran after the Second World War, it is clear that several cultural achievements were made. The newly gained awareness of Iran's past led to the restoration and conservation of many ancient buildings. Through such a process, traditional arts were also preserved and revived. The achievements were not all directed only to the past, however; in them one also sees self-knowledge and a welcome to the future. Never before had so much knowledge of Iranian history — and of architectural history in general — been within reach of broad sections of the public. Valuable documents on Iran's history, from the pre-Islamic past to the present Islamic era, came into the public's hands and helped to shape the view of the future that was rapidly approaching. In this eclectic search for form and identity, certain periods were taken up stylistically: the Elamite ziggurat façade, the Sassanid parabolic arch, Seljuk brickwork, Safavid glazed tile, and especially the nineteenth-century Qajar architectural vocabulary were drawn on by post-war architects in Iran. A subsidiary but steady inclination toward vernacular, rural, mud-brick, and brick architecture also took shape.
In architecture as a matter of nature and science, Iranians acquired the most advanced awareness of contemporary scientific and technical knowledge and its practical application to building problems. By the late 1970s, Iranian specialists were counted among the world's leading architects and urbanists, while traditional environmental modulators such as wind-towers and house-gardens were also being given a scientific exposition (see Bahadori, 'Passive cooling systems in Iranian architecture,' in Scientific American 228/2, February 1978).
At the same time, these gains were accompanied by losses. Among the cultural casualties one may mention the loss of a particular Iranian traditional 'lifestyle'. The destruction of many residential quarters in Iran's old cities is evidence of this claim. This affected the entire range of income groups. Along with the loss of these traditions there was also a wider architectural loss — namely, the loss of the centring role of the mosque in the community. Throughout this era, not even one major mosque was built, although many historic mosques were restored. This situation reflects a utilitarian attitude to religious institutions and other traditional organisations. Another casualty was the failure of any new spatial order to take the place of the traditional one, with the new technical knowledge unable to fill the gap. Urbanisation and secularisation are afflictions not only of Iran but of all traditional societies undergoing rapid transformation. Even so, the lack of cultural and spatial continuity of Iran's new urban environment with the existing traditional patterns only added to alienation and disquiet.
Ecologically, mention should be made — as a casualty — of the form of Iran's human settlements and their inefficient new growth. With its great population explosion of the 1970s, Tehran was unable, given the limits of its water supply and green space, to meet the needs of its citizens. Exhaust from vehicles, factories, and polluting domestic heating, under conditions of atmospheric inversion, has produced a serious pollution problem. Other Iranian cities — historically maintaining their fragile environmental balance by sitting at the edge of the great deserts — today, because of population growth, urban sprawl, and pollution, experience environmental problems similar to Tehran's. At the small scale, the indigenous adapted forms of architecture for the hot-arid climate — defined by the density of units, by materials of high thermal mass, by south-facing iwans, by natural ventilation, and by refreshing gardens — have been challenged by the dispersed and isolated forms of the 'mechanical Parthenons' of other climatic regions, which are by their nature unsuited to a hot-dry environment, and have surrendered to them.
Considering all this, only modest gains can be added to the rich heritage of Iranian architecture. But the important lessons drawn from this era are more in the form of questions than answers: How can a traditional society alter its own built forms and symbols in such a way that, while answering its internal values and needs, it is also in step with the new realism of the twentieth century? What kind of architectural and urbanistic approach is energy-efficient enough to allow the survival of its human settlements? How, while facing the issues arising from the world's population explosion, the general decline of world resources, and the increasing interdependence of nations, can the quality of life and human aims be maintained and increased?
Bibliography: see also P. Rajabi, Memari-ye Iran dar dowreh-ye Pahlavi (Architecture of Iran in the Pahlavi era), Tehran 1976. (N. Ardalan)
