Development, architecture, and the formation of heritage in late twentieth-century Iran

Development, architecture, and the formation of heritage in late twentieth-century Iran
Author: Ali Mozaffari
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 427
Release: 2020-10-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 152615014X

What is the relationship between development as a globalizing project and the production of cultural specificities in developmental contexts? Utilising an architectural lens, this book illustrates how development instigates interest in the past and in the process, creates heritage. It show multiple uses of the past and their contestation in highly fluid social contexts.

Development, Architecture, and the Formation of Heritage in Late Twentieth-Century Iran

Development, Architecture, and the Formation of Heritage in Late Twentieth-Century Iran
Author: Ali Mozaffari
Publisher:
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2020-10-13
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 9781526150158

In developing contexts, competing ideas of the past have played a vital role in understanding the present and imagining the future. This vitality is discerned in both politics and culture but importantly, in cultural expressions such as architecture. This book interprets development as a globalizing project that instigates complex processes of historical consciousness in developing nations. The tangible effect of this consciousness is a deliberate reappraisal and appropriation of past practices and forms to renegotiate present conditions. This selective and conscious use of the past in the present suggests heritage at work. Architectural design is an exemplar of this cultural process. Focusing on Iran between the 1970s and early 1990, this book illustrates how architecture became a conduit for the production of heritage at large in a modernizing Muslim society, and how that process has been entangled with development and intellectual debates before and after the Islamic Revolution.

The Topkapi Scroll

The Topkapi Scroll
Author: Gülru Necipoğlu
Publisher: Getty Publications
Total Pages: 414
Release: 1996-03-01
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0892363355

Since precious few architectural drawings and no theoretical treatises on architecture remain from the premodern Islamic world, the Timurid pattern scroll in the collection of the Topkapi Palace Museum Library is an exceedingly rich and valuable source of information. In the course of her in-depth analysis of this scroll dating from the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century, Gülru Necipoğlu throws new light on the conceptualization, recording, and transmission of architectural design in the Islamic world between the tenth and sixteenth centuries. Her text has particularly far-reaching implications for recent discussions on vision, subjectivity, and the semiotics of abstract representation. She also compares the Islamic understanding of geometry with that found in medieval Western art, making this book particularly valuable for all historians and critics of architecture. The scroll, with its 114 individual geometric patterns for wall surfaces and vaulting, is reproduced entirely in color in this elegant, large-format volume. An extensive catalogue includes illustrations showing the underlying geometries (in the form of incised “dead” drawings) from which the individual patterns are generated. An essay by Mohammad al-Asad discusses the geometry of the muqarnas and demonstrates by means of CAD drawings how one of the scroll’s patterns could be used co design a three-dimensional vault.

A Companion to Islamic Art and Architecture

A Companion to Islamic Art and Architecture
Author: Finbarr Barry Flood
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 1442
Release: 2017-06-16
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1119068576

The two-volume Companion to Islamic Art and Architecture bridges the gap between monograph and survey text by providing a new level of access and interpretation to Islamic art. The more than 50 newly commissioned essays revisit canonical topics, and include original approaches and scholarship on neglected aspects of the field. This two-volume Companion showcases more than 50 specially commissioned essays and an introduction that survey Islamic art and architecture in all its traditional grandeur Essays are organized according to a new chronological-geographical paradigm that remaps the unprecedented expansion of the field and reflects the nuances of major artistic and political developments during the 1400-year span The Companion represents recent developments in the field, and encourages future horizons by commissioning innovative essays that provide fresh perspectives on canonical subjects, such as early Islamic art, sacred spaces, palaces, urbanism, ornament, arts of the book, and the portable arts while introducing others that have been previously neglected, including unexplored geographies and periods, transregional connectivities, talismans and magic, consumption and networks of portability, museums and collecting, and contemporary art worlds; the essays entail strong comparative and historiographic dimensions The volumes are accompanied by a map, and each subsection is preceded by a brief outline of the main cultural and historical developments during the period in question The volumes include periods and regions typically excluded from survey books including modern and contemporary art-architecture; China, Indonesia, Sub-Saharan Africa, Sicily, the New World (Americas)

Building Iran

Building Iran
Author: Talinn Grigor
Publisher: Fastprint Publishing
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2009
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 9781934772782

Revolution and tradition are two sides of the same coin in Talinn Grigor's book on Iranian architecture. It starts in 1925 after Reza Pahlavi seized control of the country, but it arcs back to Ancient and Medieval Persia. Not that the government was rejecting modernity. IT instead promoted a reconstruction of the past that would aid efforts to make modern Iran an independent nation with an irrefutable claim to existence and power. Prodigious archival research informs Grigor's account of the excavations and discoveries Iranian authorities used to construct monuments to national heroes like Omar Khayyam, an important mathematician and astronomer of the 11th century as well as the author of the 'Rubauyat'. Grigor also brings immense knowledge to her lively discussions of the modern idiom integrated into such retrospective monuments and buildings. This book is the first in English to study 20th century Iranian architecture within the historical contexts that shaped its from and significance. The corpus of photographs will help the many readers unfamiliar with the architectural riches of Iran. Current turbulence and misunderstanding with the Middle East highlight the important of Grigor's book. ILLUSTRATIONS: 158

Turko-Persia in Historical Perspective

Turko-Persia in Historical Perspective
Author: Robert L. Canfield
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2002-04-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780521522915

The first book-length study to examine Turko-Persian culture as an entity.

Forming National Identity in Iran

Forming National Identity in Iran
Author: Ali Mozaffari
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 357
Release: 2014-06-20
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0857734962

Modern Iran is a country with two significant but competing discourses of national identity, one stemming from ancient pre-Islamic customs and mythology, the other from Islamic Shi'i practices and beliefs. At one time co-existing and often mutually reinforcing, in more modern times they have been appropriated by intellectuals and the state who have drawn upon their narratives and traditions to support and authenticate their ideologies. The result has been an often-confused notion of identity in Iran. In this essential work, Ali Mozaffari explores the complex processes involved in the formation of Iranian national identity. He lays particular stress upon the importance of place, for it is through the concept of place that collective national identity and ideas of homeland are expressed and disseminated. The author reveals the ways in which homeland is conceived both through designated permanent sites and ritual performance, illustrating his arguments through an analysis of the ancient Achaemenid capital of Persepolis and the Shi'i rituals of Moharram. In a final part of the book, he extends his analysis to the Ancient Iran Museum and the Islamic Period Museum, housed in the National Museum of Iran, showing how the major transformations of twentieth-century Iran, which have so far been perceived in terms of political discourses and historical events, are in fact concerned with conceiving place. Forming National Identity in Iran offers powerful insights into the forces shaping national identity in Iran, which makes it a valuable contribution to the cultural and political importance of place.

A History of Modern Iran

A History of Modern Iran
Author: Ervand Abrahamian
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 275
Release: 2018-08-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 1107198348

A succinct and highly readable narrative of modern Iran from the mid-nineteenth century to the present.

Governing by Design

Governing by Design
Author: Aggregate Architectural History Collaborative
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Pre
Total Pages: 302
Release: 2012-04-29
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 0822977893

Governing by Design offers a unique perspective on twentieth-century architectural history. It disputes the primacy placed on individuals in the design and planning process and instead looks to the larger influences of politics, culture, economics, and globalization to uncover the roots of how our built environment evolves. In these chapters, historians offer their analysis on design as a vehicle for power and as a mediator of social currents. Power is defined through a variety of forms: modernization, obsolescence, technology, capital, ergonomics, biopolitics, and others. The chapters explore the diffusion of power through the establishment of norms and networks that frame human conduct, action, identity, and design. They follow design as it functions through the body, in the home, and at the state and international level. Overall, Aggregate views the intersection of architecture with the human need for what Foucault termed "governmentality"—societal rules, structures, repetition, and protocols—as a way to provide security and tame risk. Here, the conjunction of power and the power of design reinforces governmentality and infuses a sense of social permanence despite the exceedingly fluid nature of societies and the disintegration of cultural memory in the modern era.

Contemporary Architecture in Iran

Contemporary Architecture in Iran
Author: Amir Bani-Masoud
Publisher: Independently Published
Total Pages: 156
Release: 2020-06-15
Genre:
ISBN:

Contemporary Architecture in Iran: from 1925 to the present aims to provide an enjoyable history of contemporary architecture in Iran from Iran's modernization during the mid-1920s to the present. It explores how hopes for a new and better society in Iran became linked to new architectural forms. The book discusses how factors such as the development of new environment, the rise of the architectural profession, and the transformation of the building industry in Iran, all led to the emergence of mature modernist architecture in this country. The book also examines the convergence of architecture with political and social developments in Iran. Architectural developments and the formation of the first generation of trained Iranian architects have been shaped by social developments in Iran. Thus, when discussing various architectural innovations, this text pays close attention to relevant historical developments and social context. This book is divided into seven chapters. The first chapter consists of two major parts. The first part explores factors that led to the first blossoming of modernism in Iran and why Tehran was the locus of this innovation. The second part of the first chapter focuses on the urban renewal program during the reign of Reza Shah, which was the first systematic attempt at urban planning in Iran. Moreover, during the twentieth century, the growth of modern industry and the oil urbanization in Iran led to massive urbanization and the rise of new cities. Focusing on three architectural tendencies (Neoclassicism, Islamic revivalism and the neo-Achaemenid style) of the Sabk-e Melli (the Iranian national style), the second chapter examines how nationalism as a political approach led to the development of a new style in Iranian architecture, as can be seen in the designs for various government buildings that were erected during Reza Shah's reign. The third chapter examines the modernization of Iranian architecture, which entailed the introduction of new forms and techniques. Moreover, it was during this time that Iranian architecture began to develop nearly all of the features of a full-fledged profession. The fourth chapter focuses on the relationship between the modern house, which was a key aspect of Iran's modernist fabric, and Iranian academic architecture. The last part of the fourth chapter examines the mid-1940s apartment houses that catered to tenants of various incomes. Focusing on housing in the Metropolis, the fifth chapter discusses the first multi-block high-rise housing complex projects that arose during the 1970s. This chapter also discusses the White Revolution which not only attempted and achieved a far-reaching transformation of Iranian society but also accelerated growth of the professional middle class. The White Revolution, which developed into a series of white elephant projects, was the main reason for the rapid urban growth rate in Iran. The sixth chapter considers the three phenomena of the International Style, High Modernism and Modern Regionalism, and thereby provides a glimpse of the state of Iranian Architecture. The last chapter of this book covers Iranian architecture after the 1979 revolution. It explores why at this time the main concern of Iranian architects was to marry tradition with the ideas and developments of modernist architecture. This chapter also discusses the new, young generation of Iranian architects that have a global and international rather than regional and imperial focus.Ultimately, Iranian architecture is continuing to progress and develop. This book will hopefully increase awareness of and inspire future research on contemporary architecture in Iran. Moreover, it is also intended to enable Western readers to develop an understanding of modern architecture in Iran.