The increasing inclination of students toward the discipline of architecture; the spread of every kind of guild and professional grouping in this discipline; the development of research and publishing activity; the rising attention of the state and of society and the appearance of patrons; and, more important than all of these, the construction of works by leading architects, together with the first signs that the awarding of state projects to the better architects is becoming institutionalised — all of these turned the seventies decade into the dawn of a new era for Iranian architecture. Yet these developments have, at the same time, gone hand in hand with weakness in education, disorder in the systems of construction, and a fall in professional ethics (see the editorial of Memar 14). In other words, architecture took its first steps toward rethinking, organisation, and the gaining of social standing and professional authority; it consolidated that position by producing a body of attention-worthy work; and at the same time it must struggle and labour to raise the level of education, to reform the systems of construction, and to refine professional ethics.
The Grand Memar Award 1380 (2001) is a sign of the flowering of those positive currents of the seventies decade, and of a determination to continue the elevating efforts and to overcome the lacks, disorders, and weaknesses of the architecture of the eighties decade. The Grand Award was a call to evaluate architectural achievements, to document and present its results, to disseminate its values, and to seek ways of institutionalising the reciprocal relation of architect and society.
Evaluation, documentation, presentation, dissemination, and the institutionalising of the architect-society relation demand a large and comprehensive system, of which the Grand Award is one pillar — and at the same time a relatively complete model of its structure. The jury; the prizes and certificates of recognition; the honouring of the selected architects in the presence of the active members and representatives of the professional, scientific, and administrative currents and institutions of architecture; the repeated public exhibition of the chosen works; and the full reflection of the entire affair in the magazine (Memar 15) — these were a diagram of the various sides on which that model functions.
The soundness of the Grand Award's performance was such that, immediately after the announcement of its results and the introduction of the chosen works, two semi-state bodies — the Maskan Investment Company and the Pardis Technology Park Institute — requested the names and details of the selected architects from the Memar Nashr Institute, and placed them at the disposal of their own implementing teams. We had already seen this kind of effect from the introduction of good architecture in the magazine.
From the Grand Award to the full taking-up of the mechanisms of evaluation, documentation, presentation, and dissemination across the whole field of construction; and from the rising force of that uptake, to the strengthening of education and research; and, in the light of its soundness, to the refining of professional ethics — that is a long road, the speed of which depends on the will and resolve of those few who travel it.
The difficulty that became visible in the introductory meeting of the Grand-Award-selected architects with the owners of the research companies wanting to build their facilities at Pardis Technology Park was the question of how to bring the architect's idea and the client's idea closer together. For the client, the decisive criteria are well-known measurements whose validity is beyond doubt and whose share in the final value of the product is at its maximum. The client does not know why the work of architects ought to differ from one another, and has no picture of that difference. He has not replaced his market-tinged view of the forces governing construction with a view oriented toward other values. The land, by itself — before any level of architecture has come into being upon it — already constitutes more than half, perhaps two-thirds, of the building's economic value. The difference between the work of one architect and another can hardly leave a meaningful trace upon that equation.
The right and proper use of land — which in the customary culture of urbanism has been translated into 'the maximum use of the land's capacity' — appears, in the client's eyes, as obtaining the densest possible packing within the legal limits of the urban code; an end to which the architect, even at the height of his art, can hardly contribute. If there is still some minimal architecture in the market, it is one that in the end is measured by money. The struggle of architecture's real values against absolutely-economic values is a hard struggle. Architecture cannot deny economic values, or set them aside in people's eyes — but it can, by quantifying and rendering measurable some part of architecture's values, convert them into economic values. In parallel, the effort to spread the culture of perceiving and enjoying the pure values of architecture (which lie above the quantitative ones) ought to limit the share of the economic.
Those pure values of architecture are precisely the ones the jurors have drawn out of the tangible, palpable reality of the better architectural achievements, and have expressed in language intelligible to society. The expression of those values must be such that it can shape the present perceptions of architecture in society. Those whose duty is to express the values must put themselves in the place of ordinary people, and try to begin the ascent to their own level of perception from where ordinary people stand. For ordinary people, in turn, in order to reach those values, must begin their climb from the level of their own perceptions. If they are not given help, they will remain at the same level.
The jurors of the Grand Award attended to this point from the very start of their work, and even said it aloud: that the evaluation of works for the Grand Award differs from the judging of competition entries, whose aim is to choose the best design for the use of the client. In judging a competition it is enough that the client believe in the technical competence of the jurors and in the soundness of the judging method; an effort to express the values, or the criteria of choice, in intelligible language only adds to the client's confidence. We have seen that, when sufficient belief is not formed in the client, then — although the rules of the competition and the obligations arising from them require him to submit to the jury's view — he turns away from it, and prefers his own values to those of the jurors, which are the values of architecture.
The difference between evaluating Grand-Award works and judging competition entries is the difference between an act of culture-making and a simple act of executive decision; though the latter, too, has its indirect effect on culture-making. The juror's audience in an architectural competition is a single client. In the Grand Award's evaluation, the audience is the whole society; if society fails to grasp the architectural values that the jurors have drawn out of the works, no blame attaches to it — and beyond making a greater effort to speak its language, the jurors have no other course.
In choosing the jurors of the Grand Award, the attempt was made, first, that their composition should be comprehensive of the scientific-theoretical and the professional-executive sides, and likewise of the more radical and the more moderate currents; second, that each one of them, in whatever field and tendency, should have the necessary expertise and standing. They therefore had the competence to judge; and the judging method was effective in arriving at a definite result. Yet the jurors' statement, in spite of their broad and frank discussion among themselves and their relatively wide-ranging verbal experiment in the giving and receiving of architectural understanding, did not pass beyond the limits of their own specialised conceptions and notions; it could not make contact with the level of understanding of ordinary people. Indeed, even at the professional and specialised level, the language of the article drew more on terms borrowed from outside architecture than on terms drawn from within architecture — and this is not a difficulty peculiar to us, but a general difficulty of architectural thought in the new period.
The model of the Grand Award, in order that it may extend itself across the whole activity of construction — and may steer that activity (which now lacks truth and identity) toward the truth and identity of architecture itself — must be able to express architectural values in a language drawn from the truth and identity of architecture itself; even though architecture's truth and identity has its root in the truth and identity of the human being, and the human being's truth and identity is in turn a breath of the divine spirit and the result of the human's being taught the names by Him. It is hoped that, on another occasion, an independent essay on the ground of architectural expression — for the dissemination of architectural values to the architectural reader — will be presented.
Another step in extending the structure of the Grand Award model to the whole activity of construction — beyond the architectural expression of values in language that can be understood and disseminated — is to make a greater effort, alongside introducing unknown good architects to society and offering them the support they need, to help promising recent graduates to obtain the stages of experience-gathering toward its high goals, and likewise to render sound the vital tissues of the profession and to rebuild its institutions.
Apprenticeship and job-finding for promising recent graduates — who must, one after another, join the front ranks of architecture's advancement and elevation — calls for the design and creation of a particular institution. In response to the conditions of social capital governing such an institution, its standing and credit lie in a body of well-known good architects who, after promising graduates have passed the necessary examinations, place them in a serious, formal professional environment under their own protection and guidance. This institution, while being a great workshop for the apprenticeship of the young and for their passing through the stages of acquiring professional skills, will, by virtue of the names and reputations of the eminent architects supervising the quality of its work, attract the trust of clients in search of good architecture more than the unknown engineering offices ever could.
Such an institution of work and apprenticeship would resemble the 'growth centres' or incubators in technology parks, the experience of which is now several decades old. Such a growth centre would nurture the seeds of the birth of new offices and the living, dynamic experience of architectural education within itself. Beyond that, by cultivating sound professional tissues, it would replace the defective ones. The Memar Nashr Institute is at this very moment thinking about the design of a model of such a growth centre.
