Reza Javaheri, born in 1946, holds an M.A. of architecture, an M.A. of environmental design, and a Ph.D. of urban and zonal planning — all three degrees taken from the University of Oregon in the U.S.A. After his education in 1977 he cooperated with Yazd Teacher's University, Birjand University, the Energy Ministry's Management University in Karaj, the area and green-space planning for Kangan, and design of architectural projects with various consulting engineers.
Javaheri's educational process — from architecture to environmental design and landscape, and then to urban and zonal planning, as well as his Ph.D. thesis "Selseleh's Zonal Plan and Alashtar's Master Plan" — together with his professional experience, partly show his tendencies and directions. But Javaheri's main interests and skills are most visible in his personal pursuits.
Javaheri is also a photographer, a carpenter and a painter. In 1982, on his return to the U.S., contemporaneously with setting up Javaheri & Co. Architectural and Urban Design, he established the "Nini" Company in Seattle to design and make puppets for films and videos. He wrote stories for children, grown-ups, and for commercial, political and educational purposes, which led to the production of several educational and promotional TV programmes. Also in one case these puppets were used in a thirty-second show for the Washington State governor's election campaign.
Javaheri's professional experience in the formal architecture and urbanism of consulting engineers — with all their specific, restrictive conditions — never quite gave him a playground for his spatial imagination, his landscape gift and his skill in pictorial expression. In the experience of the puppet shows, he combined the unreleased force of his spatial-landscape imagination with narrative imagination, and showed that his narrative imagination too has a very colourful, eventful world of its own.
He is an effortless, unfussy image-maker. Whether in his line work — whether in pieces that count as paintings in their own right, or in sketches giving form to urban, narrative or puppet scenes for executional use — the strength of his technique and his expressive skill are quite apparent. The main feature of his drawings and paintings is the rapid, simple, unpretentious transfer of the feeling of a space or a story. It is as though he has wanted, even while describing a space for his listener or narrating an imaginative tale for children, to draw — with whatever pen and colour were at hand — what he was describing, as an aid to its visualisation. He has no interest in turning his studies into "finished" pictures.
This feature is visible not only in his studies for puppet stories — legendary lands where stone and mountain and tree and plant are all alive, legendary creatures and characters, and sketches for urban scenes — but also in his paintings, and more importantly in his most recent architectural work, his own residential house. Not only does the drawing of the plans — which carries a sketchbook air — show this feature; the form and the execution of the building also clearly reflect this spirit.
Though some of the elements employed in the building — the entrance, the very thick interior and exterior columns and capitals, or some of the forms like the circular and rectangular balconies tangent to one another and the rounded, tower-like corner of the building — may look populist and eclectic, or though fine decorative craft may not have been employed in the execution, still, from any point outside or inside the building one looks at its volumes and spaces, and all the proportions, everything, are utterly rhythmic and captivating.
Both in the plans and in the rendering of the spaces, everything is very simple and free of fussiness over geometry and detail; yet the built form, the execution and the rendering of the interior and exterior spaces are so rich, varied, colourful and winding that only the fluent, improvisatory mind of an artist can carry it off.
For Javaheri — as his drawings show — geometry is no more than a language. He does not ascribe to the circle, the semicircle or any other geometrical shape the sort of property upon which one might found an architecture. He knows that there is no abstract geometry — nor even any abstract geometric volume — in architecture. What exists is the flow of spaces in the configuration of the masses of a building, for which geometric sections have no property beyond serving as a guide for building up their components. It is precisely this freedom from closed geometry that gives Javaheri's imagination its field, so that his architecture — even in a constrained volume — is this protean, undulant and nested, and each space unfolds wave after wave until at last the deeper, central space sought is reached.
Captions: 1. Western façade overlooking the Maqsoudbeik river. 2. Study in ground floor. 3. Bedroom (duplex unit). 4. Swimming pool (ground floor). 5. Site plan. 6. Ground-floor plan, with studio and swimming pool (basement and garages not shown). 7. First-floor plan, three-bedroom unit. 8, 9. Second- and third-floor plans, duplex unit. 10. Fourth-floor plan, independent suite with terrace. 11. Living and dining room (duplex unit). 12. First-floor terrace overlooking the river. 13. Northern corner of the building. 14, 15. Examples of painting works. 16. Site plan and green space of the Gaz-e-Kangan residential complex (design and architectural consultant). 17. Scene design for a legendary puppet show. 18, 19. Examples of puppet characters. 20. Puppet-character study. 21. Performance scene.
