The realities of how the city takes shape became clearer to me when, for a one-year term, I became a member of the facade committee of one of the districts of the Tehran municipality. In mid-1398 (2019), through the efforts of the Society of Consulting Engineers and in coordination with the Deputy for Architecture and Urban Planning of the Tehran municipality, a group of so-called professional architects was added to the facade committees of the municipality's 22 districts. Until that day, the members of this committee were the district's urban-planning managers and experts, accompanied by two university faculty members, one an urban planner and the other an architect. I do not know what the municipality and the Society of Consulting Engineers had seen in these committees that made them think that adding a professional architect to the group would help the committee and, consequently, the city. They talked with some architects, and some, like me, agreed to play a part in this committee. The lot for one of the districts fell to me.1
A ceremony was held, and after speeches by city managers and representatives of the Society, they called us one by one, gave us our letters of appointment and, with great fanfare, sent us off to the municipalities of each district. With such an elaborate send-off, anyone else in our place would also have been excited and resolved to reform what was going on in the facade committees. Of course, I must confess that since, naturally, I myself had several times had to pass through the "ordeal" of the facade committees with projects under design, the exasperating judgements of the professors and experts on the facade committees had made me sensitive to this committee as well. So it was not long, on that very second day when the judgement of some of them reopened my old wounds, before I locked horns with them and made my opposing position clear.2 Of course, my colleagues were very kind to me, and in the end, by talking and listening to one another, we were able to reach agreements on the criteria and the method of evaluating project designs. I think that after that the method of evaluating and guiding projects went better, and I too became more satisfied. Apparently I had managed to bring the influence of the professional architect, for better or worse, to bear on the projects referred to the committee.
As I said, at the start of my presence I thought I was ready to have a positive influence on the course of what is built in the city. Although the presence of professionals seemed a great help in reaching this goal, after a few sessions I realised that the problem seemed to be the other way round! Being in this gathering was more to my own benefit, raising my awareness of the professional environment. In these sessions I became more aware of my own and my colleagues' place in shaping the city, and I understood that our role in developing the form of the city is not only minor, it may even be somewhat destructive!
The subject of our sessions was the review of apartment designs. And not the overall design, but only the design of their facades! How only the facade design could be evaluated without considering the project as a whole is itself in need of a lengthy debate that does not fit in this essay! But an important point that I had not paid attention to until that day was this: when, where and by whom are these apartments, which shape the city, designed and built?
Apartments, in the sense in which we use the word,3 are the city's 3-to-5- and 6-storey residential buildings, and they account for the largest built areas of Iran's small and large cities. These buildings, which provide the dwellings of city dwellers on their floors, are generally built, depending on their location in the city, on plots of between 100, 150 and 700, 800 or 1000 square metres, on the site of the city's one- or two-storey single-family villa4 houses. In this way, with the appearance of these buildings on the "floor" of the city, an important part of the "body" of the city is rebuilt or renewed and the city takes "shape". The space inside these buildings fills the content of the city, and their walls define the edge of the city. The facade committee became the means by which I was present in the noisy arena of construction, and the result of this presence was the discovery of a world I had not known. In those very first sessions I became aware of a current of designing and building the city whose methods and processes were completely unfamiliar to me. It was as if, in an interstellar5 pull, I had been swallowed from my own world into a parallel world. The space-time of this new world was completely unknown, and it lifted the curtain on truths about the shaping of the city that were new to me. It was at this moment that an important part of the construction of the city's physical space was decoded for me. Processes far more powerful than the currents of designing and building the scattered individual buildings of the world known to me, and which, as it happens, play a considerable role in the qualities and quantities of the city. In my view, knowing this truth seemed important, to the point that it seems that without this knowledge it will not be possible to reform what we recognise as the disorder of the city's face and fabric. So I decided, in this short space, to share an overview of these findings, to compare the two worlds, and, by coining two terms, "world A" and "world B", to distinguish the position and nature of the two. World "A" refers to the world in which the writer has been designing, and world "B" refers to the parallel world that the writer discovered after his presence on the facade committee!
Parallel worlds
The committee met once a week, and each week about 50 new projects were referred to it. The presentation and defence of the facade designs were done by the designers of these projects. It was there that I became acquainted with an important community of apparently anonymous offices and architects of the city, and realised that the city is being designed and built by these same unpretentious technical offices.
The proportion of projects was such that they were divided among 10 or 12 design offices, and each office that came to the committee generally defended more than one project. The speed of design in these offices was one of the most important things that set them apart. Designs were prepared by the offices at high speed. Hardly any office spent more than one or two weeks preparing the designs, nor could it spend more time on design than this; the design fee was negligible, and spending more time would have made the whole thing unprofitable. The clients, in other words the builders, also had "no time to waste on design" and had to bring the projects to the construction stage quickly. By comparison, in world "A" one or two weeks counts as a negligible span and can hold only a small percentage of a project's progress.6 In the parallel world this time counts as very long, and its designers can bring at least 20 projects "from zero to a hundred" to completion in it and hand them over to the client for construction. The designers' fee is just enough for each project to be designed and taken through the municipality within two weeks at most. What they receive is so small that there is no capacity left for argument and discussion, or for spending time and money to correct and improve the design. The question of the fee in this district, which was one of the city's less-privileged districts, is set at the lowest possible amount. Naturally, the designers' fee is a function of the construction cost and the value of the building, and that in turn is a function of the building's location in the city; and the lower the cost of building, the more limited the architect's share of the project's overall economy will be. A low fee removes the possibility of change and correction from the design process and raises the designer's resistance to the smallest change in the project, even though, for example, by moving the position of a room door the value of the space of the home could be multiplied, or with a little more care in choosing the facade cladding the city could be saved from becoming an incongruous exhibition of materials. But what use? The more we insisted, the more the designer refused! As a last resort, the designers would go into action with the tactic of frankness and, admitting all the shortcomings of their design, would present "what is an ant that its offal should be worth anything" to prove that corrections to the project were impossible given the amount of the contract with the client. The municipality, for its part, had no wish at all for files to be held up at the barrier of the committee. Financial equations always have the upper hand, and all matters of time and quality are arranged beneath them. Now the question is whether, with the time-consuming design methods of world "A", the problem of world "B" can be solved. Why should another method not be put forward in world "B"? For example, could one or several simple and unpretentious but correct and sound models not be taken as the basis for designing apartments, so that designers, by developing them and spending less time and money, could prepare a better design? How can one not spend time and money and yet obtain a product similar to costly buildings? Will insisting on this wrong path have any destination other than banality?
Leaving aside the difference in the concept of "time and cost" in these two worlds, the quality of "design and outlook" on projects is also very different in these two worlds. Basically, the quality of design in the matter of designing apartments depends on many issues. From urban rules and regulations to economic frameworks, all of them narrow the field for the designer. Leaving aside the ins and outs of the matter, this issue is almost the same for both worlds. But the designs in world "B" are not defensible. These designs surrender to the wishes and tastes of their builders, who either still insist on their building resembling the buildings of the cities of ancient Rome or, the most up-to-date and at the same time the most dangerous of them, influenced by the images of the projects of "other" architects, demand from their designers something similar to those models promoted in the media; and in this way the face of the city takes shape through quick and superficial borrowings from compositions that have "gone viral" in cyberspace. Interestingly, most of the visual sources inspiring world "B" belong to world "A", and that is why I consider this syndrome more dangerous than the syndrome of Roman or classical architecture. The reason is that, generally, the concern of design and designers in world "A" is not the understanding of architecture and the building as the body of the city. They seek rather to create a unique work. Creativity for world "A" means finding a form and content completely different from the conventional routines and the ordinary neighbours of the project. In this world, valuable architecture is generally understood as that "unique" layout that corresponds to the particular features of its own site, and the more unique the conditions of its time, place and content, the more sublime it will make the building. Trumpeting this difference from others also fuels the matter. Hence, generally, the traces of the individualism of the designer or of the builder and client are plainly visible on the stature of such buildings. On "unique" designs as against "reproducible" designs I have written in an essay in the journal Industrial Development of Building,7 and there is no need to repeat it here, but I will note two points. One is that, basically, the form of the city and the quality of its edge and body have an inverse relationship with individuality in the design of its buildings. The example of cities that are called beautiful is itself a seal of approval on this claim. The perception of beauty that we gain from the experience of being in an urban fabric depends less on the individual buildings of that city than on the harmony and concord that we see in the edges and bodies of the city. And it is here that we will notice the important role of the skin of apartments, that is, the facades of buildings, in the fabric of cities. To prove this, one can recall the older neighbourhoods of our cities. It seems that the buildings in these neighbourhoods, whether introverted or extroverted, are more in harmony with one another. Although the inside of individual buildings may have more variety, in response to the various needs of their inhabitants, it is as if in the realm of neighbourliness and in outward appearance the emphasis was meant to be more on commonalities than on differences! For if you fill the buildings of an alley with varied buildings each of which has a different thing to say, the city will fall into a kind of chaos, even if every single apartment in that alley has national and international medals and honours.8 In other words, placing the best architectures side by side will not necessarily produce the best street, quarter and city. Now read, from this brief account, the long story of the city taking shape with imitation buildings and poor-quality copies of the designs of various buildings, which will turn the city's edges into a Damascus bazaar of an incongruous mix of all kinds of shoddy products. These were the realities we faced every week on the facade committee. Some projects needed fewer corrections and some more. Interesting incidents were not rare either; on some occasions when we stood firm in our opposition to baseless designs and the designer had no valid reason or argument to defend it, we would be faced with the owner himself appearing at the committee, having brought a complaint about his design's failing grade to the municipality's court; or it would turn out that, because the builders did not believe in the designs approved by the committee, they did not build them, and, with the motive of saving the project and the aim of making their building stand out in the sales market, they went ahead and built the very designs they liked. Designs that bear no relation to the time and financial realities of their world. Instead of concentrating on balancing cost with the aim of building safer apartments, they insisted on imitating the walk of the "partridge"! I do not know! Perhaps the reason is that the designers and builders of the city all dream of winning the Memar Award!
In the whole of that one year, and among a large volume of files, only two projects were presented whose designers, who as it happens were among the city's well-known designers, tried to introduce a model that was appropriate and in harmony with the city's fabric. Although these two projects, too, had a government client, not a private one!
Notes
1- Of course, it seemed that no particular lottery was really held. In any case, everyone was equal for a place in every district; and some more equal than others!
2- To the point that I announced that if they carried on the work in the same old way, in the duality of designer and committee I would certainly place my chair on the side of the designers and opposite the other members of the committee!
3- Unlike the foreign understanding of one unit in a multi-unit complex, in our urban vocabulary "apartment" is the name given to the whole multi-storey, multi-unit residential complex.
4- In the foreign language, a villa means a house detached from other buildings (Detached), set within a relatively large plot. But in our urban vocabulary, a villa house refers to one- or two-storey single-unit houses built on an independent plot, even if they are wall to wall and attached to the neighbouring building.
5- "Interstellar"; a reference to a film by Christopher Nolan.
6- Right now we are working on a project of this same apartment scale, and after more than two and a half months, equal to ten weeks, we have still not delivered its concept design! Presumably the basic design (phase one) will also take two and a half months, and in the end, after 40 or 50 weeks, we will manage to deliver the construction drawings. I am almost certain that the figures given are the minimum time needed to carry out an apartment project in world "A".
7- "The architectural product, a platform for defining the building industry", internal journal of the Association of Industrial Building Manufacturers and Technologists, autumn 1403 (2024).
8- When I wrote this sentence I imagined: what would happen if we assumed the buildings of the Memar Award winners were in one alley?! So I decided to draw that alley, and so I sketched a diagram of the facades of the apartments that have won the Memar Award, from the first year it was held (1380) until now (1403), and it became a kind of pictorial history of the Memar Award-winning apartments that is presented with the text of this essay.
