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An Iranian Architecture Appreciation Post 

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As is often the case while perusing the news on Twitter/X, it’s easy to end up down the rabbit hole on a particular topic, and so it happened to me recently with Iranian architecture. Philip Oldfield is the Head of School of Built Environment at UNSW Sydney and Professor of Architecture and has a bit of an obsession with Iranian brickwork. His account features a heavy dose of it, and with photos like these, it’s understandable why.

Woof Shadow Building in Tehran by Tachra Design.

Like so much of Iran’s recent history, the brickwork is tied up in the country’s relationship with the West—the story of partial colonialism, questions of modernity, and of course, sanctions. It’s entirely possible that if not for the persistent economic warfare led by the US, that architecture like that featured in the image above (and many more below) would not be being built in Iran today, but Western sanctions helped spur a rethink—or what Iranian architecture philosopher Razieh Ghorbani Kharaji calls “creative destruction.”

Sanctions Force a Rethink

For a long period, Iranian architecture largely mimicked modern Western and classical styles while turning away from Persian inspirations.

The past two decades of Western sanctions, however, have been a totalizing event, targeting aspects of everyday life. That includes In 2019 the US sanctioned the sale, supply, or transfer to or from Iran of raw and semi-finished metals, graphite, coal, and software for integrating industrial purposes will be sanctionable if those materials are to be used in connection with the Iranian construction sector.

Perhaps it’s no coincidence then that Iranian architects began embracing local materials in contemporary ways. As Oldfield says:

I was struck by how Iranian architects are taking local materials such as brick and tile and reinterpreting their use through advanced software tools and technologies, resulting in complex forms and geometries with curving, folding and even twisting brickwork, that is not only visually appealing, but also provides shade and privacy.

It’s no doubt more messy than that, as Kharaji writes, there are also construction, design, development, representation, even pedagogy, activism and speculation factors to consider, but the economic war is always present:

On the one hand, sanctions are viewed as an obstacle, and the cause of Iran’s “global isolation.” This has more than ever created a socio-psychological market for the cultivation of things that are “modern,” “western,” “global,” and “foreign.” On the other hand, sanctions are viewed as a rather positive force—an opportunity to build an Islamic economy independent of Western imperial influences. Such nationalistic reactions, which are tied to the spatial discourses of colonialism, globalization, and modernism, have also influenced architectural practices in terms of design, material culture, and financial calculations.

To build on this, I argue that sanctions have simultaneously worked as a closing and opening mechanism. In other words, they may have closed the borders to certain goods, capital and material flows, but they have also opened it to particular ideologies and cultural economies. This resembles the inherent polarities within the word “sanction” itself—a contronym, which means “permission,” and “deterrent” at the same time. The invocation of sanctions as a contronym has a value as an analytical framework because Iran has suffered from massive sanctions in the past few decades, but what this work has found is the process by which Iranian people and the Iranian state “sanction” themselves. Sanction here does not mean the deterrence that was imposed on them, but the permission Iranians have given themselves to respond to the ongoing political and economic instabilities through different cultural and economic strategies. 

Such strategies are producing results like the following:

Koohsar Residential Apartment in Shiraz, Iran by AshariArchitects

https://amazingarchitecture.com/residential-building/koohsar-residential-apartment-in-shiraz-iran-by-ashariarchitects

According to Kharaji’s discussions with Iranian architects, there is no binary between the traditional and the modern; It’s all part of a continuous history—and what an architectural history it is:

And embedded in that history—although for a period cast aside—is an emphasis on what’s become an urgent necessity.

Environmental Design

In a rapidly heating world there is renewed interest from architects and engineers in ways to keep cool without burning more fossil fuels. And that’s led to a focus on the ancient Persian badgir, or wind tower. (There is some debate about its origins with arguments that they were first developed in ancient Egypt).

Conventional air conditioning already accounts for a fifth of total electricity consumption globally, and the wind catcher provides yet another reminder that there are plenty of ways to address the climate crisis in the past if we care to look—and suffer some minor inconvenience.

While wind catchers are attempting a comeback in Iran, they have, in various forms, been adopted elsewhere at times. From the BBC:

In the UK, some 7,000 variations of wind catchers were installed in public buildings between 1979 and 1994. They can be seen from buildings such as the Royal Chelsea Hospital in London, to supermarkets in Manchester.

These modernised wind catchers bear little resemblance to Iran’s towering structures. On one three-storey building on a busy road in north London, small hot pink ventilation towers allow passive ventilation. Atop a shopping centre in Dartford, conical ventilation towers rotate to catch the breeze with the help of a rear wing that keeps the tower facing the prevailing wind.

The US too has adopted wind-catcher-inspired designs with enthusiasm. One such example is the visitor center at Zion National Park in southern Utah. The park sits in a high desert plateau, comparable to Yazd in climate and topography, and the use of passive cooling technologies including the wind catcher nearly eliminated the need for mechanical air-conditioning. Scientists have recorded a temperature difference of 16C (29F) between the outside and inside of the visitor centre, despite the many bodies regularly passing through.

Such technology has the added bonus of helping to reduce shared air in our new age of pandemics. And in urban areas where air pollution is a major concern they help to mitigate the accumulation of indoor pollutants, creating healthier living and working environments.

And there are plenty of ways to improve the ancient design to make them even more effective.

Beyond wind towers, there are other ways Iranian architects are today using bricks to increase shade:

Here’s the Hitra Office Building in Tehran.

Not sure about pet safety, but it aims to bring natural light deep into the building while preventing overheating. It uses a brick-clad steel frame, and instead of the typical light well in the building’s center, it has been placed on the sun-filled southern edge where there is a “scoop” that overlooks a new public square.

There are also examples of shade, natural light, and ventilation:

 

Beautiful Buildings

I’m tempted to say that if someone wants to get some of these photos in front of Trump—who seems to appreciate buildings more than most people—maybe that would help dissuade him from leading yet more greedy violence on behalf of Zionist oligarchs. Trump did, after all, issue an executive order last year to make federal buildings beautiful again.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, though.

Trump’s executive order calls for more classical architecture. Iran has buildings like that too.

Motifs and decorations on a stone Roman façade, Tehran. Source: Razieh Ghorbani Kharaji.

While reading up on Iranian architecture I came across one building, however, that seems right up Trump’s alley.

Students Fereshteh Asadzadeh and Ivo Pekec, developed a satirical apartment complex project, “The House Tehran is Talking About”  that combines multiple layers of western historical architecture.

“The House Tehran is Talking About.”

Here’s Asadzadeh describing its origins: 

The typical upper class residence in Tehran is deeply postmodern in its nature, with very similar stylistic tendencies. Their architectural language returns to historic elements, but without any regard for their traditional virtue (like symmetry, unity, purity), instead abusing them in the most shallow way imaginable way for only their aesthetic properties and for their connotations with power, wealth and exclusion. Elements like epistyles, colonnades, cornices, architectural orders (Dorian, Ionian and Corinthian) and ornaments from all epochs imaginable, from antiquity to Art Nouveau, form an heretical ensemble that stands in indifference to the context it is built in. Soaked in historic remembrance and paraphernalia, and playing an absurd game of historic quotes, they result in an architectural cacophony with capital as its only conductor, radiating with vehemence and excess.

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10 comments

  1. Ignacio

    Thank you Conor. A remainder that not everything out there is geostrategy, war, empires and domination games. Very very beautiful stuff. Here in Madrid, some of the buildings i like the most are made of bricks and there is a distinct brick style from the XIXth, called neomudejar with obvious influences from Arabic domination in the Iberian peninsula centuries before. Seeing pics in this article there are lessons to be learnt from Iran too!

  2. PlutoniumKun

    Persia/Iran has always had a wonderful architectural tradition, as you’d expect from a continental crossroads. Robert Byron’s ‘Road to Oxiana‘ from 1935 is an outstanding introduction (although sadly, nobody has published an illustrated version) – he strongly argued that the ancient Persian tradition is greater even than Greek or Arabic architecture. In many ways, they’ve taken the best of Central Asian, Arabic and Western influences (both stylistically and in terms of practical engineering) to create an architecture very firmly rooted in the region.

  4. DJG, Reality Czar

    Conor Gallagher: Thanks for this essay. I am reminded that in the Mediterranean world — and all the way to Iran — exteriors have to be highly functional. The weather is variable. The sunlight is wonderful — and relentless. In many areas, there is no rain in July or August. The materials for exteriors as shown in the photographs are suitable for the climates of Iran.

    But what glimpses of interiors these photos offer: A garden was central to the traditional Persian house. I am reminded of the atrium / garden at the center of the Roman house — which survives as the handsome courtyards here in the Undisclosed Region. The interior is a pleasant refuge: The best part, indeed.

    As to Trump — well, that meretriciousness is cause and effect. It isn’t as if people who go to Las Vegas are looking for the restraint of a Prairie House by Frank Lloyd Wright (which also relied on humbler materials like brick, weather-resistant exteriors, and evocations of nature).

  5. Wukchumni

    Brick seems an odd choice in a earthquake plagued place…

    All over the Central Valley you’ll see circa 1900 30 foot tall cooling towers where the heat ascends and the cool goes through an underground conduit into the house-which is typically 20 feet away. Almost all of these are non functional now, you get the idea.

    1. PlutoniumKun

      Bricks are generally a really bad idea in earthquake zones, but they have a long history of use in Persia as in many regions there wasn’t really much of an alternative. Traditionally in Persia, high gypsum mortar was used to add flexibility to the structure (going back to the Bronze Age, the Mycenaeans added layers of horizontal timbers between brick layers to make their buildings more flexible). The requirement for flexibility in brick binding was a hard lesson learned in much of Europe in the later 19th Century when mortar was replaced with cement, resulting in a lot of failed walls, many of which can be seen

      I suspect that a lot of those modern brick facades shown are not actually brick, but pre-moulded and reinforced castings.

  7. The Rev Kev

    This is a great post this. There is so much imagination that has been put into these buildings and they are certainly are a relief from Brutalist buildings of the west. However, I note this bit-

    ‘I’m tempted to say that if someone wants to get some of these photos in front of Trump—who seems to appreciate buildings more than most people—maybe that would help dissuade him from leading yet more greedy violence on behalf of Zionist oligarchs.’

    Never going to happen and if anything, he would want to destroy Iran’s famed buildings even more. During Trump’s first term he got into a spat with Iran. So he threatened to destroy all the world heritage buildings that Iran had and the Iranians were afterwards going around those magnificent buildings to say goodbye in case he did carry out what is an actual war crime.

  8. Candide

    The prospect of barbarians bombing Iran in 2026 reminds me of a story told by Brother Dave Gardner. A deaf lion (you get this detail at the end) leaps out of the forest and eats the violinist, fiddle and bow, after all the animals had gathered to hear the music. They cry out at the sight, prompting the lion to say, “Huh?”

  9. ocypode

    Thank you for the lovely piece Conor! And a good reminder that limitations do make creativity work harder.

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