This roundtable (RT) brings together discussions that offer a glimpse into current debates in the architectural history of Iran among a circle of scholars whose intellectual concerns are rooted in and associated with academic debates in Iran. Whereas mainstream discourses in architectural historiography in theory and practice have largely been rooted in Western academic discourse, this RT highlights the debates and perspectives of the new generation of Iranian scholars, reflecting their engagement with evolving historiographical concerns. The RT acknowledges a significant shift away from early Orientalist and nationalist orientations toward more critical approaches in Iranian architectural historiography. Global theoretical currents and new directions in historical studies, including postcolonial perspectives, have driven such a shift. At the same time, the discussions in this RT show that the intellectual concerns and commitments of Iranian scholars have added new layers and dimensions to this field, challenging conventional hierarchies of knowledge production. The idea is to establish that the scholars in the so-called margins, in Iran and elsewhere, are no longer simply the “native informant,”Footnote 1 but have agency to drive new intellectual debates and make important contributions to their field.
This RT is an initiative to implicitly underscore the decolonization of knowledge production in architectural historiography through what can be termed a “post-postcolonial” debate. The emphasis is subtle; although the articles do not address this debate directly, they remain focused on a specific subject while engaging with intellectual concerns that broadly resonate with the debates. The RT addresses the irony that even postcolonial critiques are produced and disseminated from within Western academic institutions. It is valid to ask what the impact of Orientalism Footnote 2 on academic discourse would be if Said had published it while in Cairo instead of at Columbia. At Western institutions, although leading scholars in the architectural studies of the Muslim world may promote postcolonial thought and reject the essentialist and reductionist narratives of Orientalists, they often gain intellectual authority by virtue of their position at the “center,” or the Western academic institutions in the Global North. Paradoxically, although they refuse colonial discourse, they are inherently expected to speak, from that central vantage point, for a vast geography, including South Asia, the Middle East, North Africa, and beyond. In contrast, scholars in Iran or elsewhere on the margins remain focused on their own regions and cultural habitus. Although being on the margin is often framed as a disadvantage, we argue that it offers a distinct epistemological advantage, as these scholars remain focused on local specificities rather than the need to formulate a “super-diverse,”Footnote 3 universalized history of art and architecture across the Muslim world.
In a meeting in Tehran that gradually paved the way for our collaboration and the eventual initiation of this RT, we reflected on the fact that although collaborations between Western and Iranian academic institutions have seen positive developments over the last two decades, Iranian partners are still primarily considered sources of information rather than producers of ideas and knowledge. This conversation provided the catalyst for the current project, as it raised the critical question of who is authorized to theorize—reflecting Spivak’s concept of the native informant and Connell’s Southern theory.Footnote 4 Spivak addresses how the Western knowledge production system relies on native informants for local information while marginalizing them as valid subjects, ensuring that the authority to theorize remains with elites in the Global North. Similarly, Raewyn Connell argues that “theory” is overwhelmingly produced in the Global North, whereas the intellectual work of the Global South is relegated to the status of empirical data, case studies, or local knowledge. Connell demonstrates that canonical social theory, from Marx and Weber to contemporary critical theory, is institutionally embedded in metropolitan centers whose historical power relations continue to shape disciplinary hierarchies. She calls for a pluralized social science, in which theory is not universalized from a single center but generated through dialogue across unequal locations, considering the margin not as a site of deficit but as a critical vantage point for rethinking the global organization of knowledge.
The current landscape of architectural historiography remains tethered to a geographical and institutional hierarchy. Even as the field moves toward a postcolonial architectural history, the intellectual authority to validate what constitutes theory remains largely concentrated in Western academic centers. This creates a structural irony, in which the critique of Western hegemony is itself produced, peer-reviewed, and disseminated by the very centers it seeks to decenter. Moreover, the leading figures in architectural history in Western academic institutions who have advocated postcolonial discourse—for example, questioned the validity of terms such as “Islamic architecture”—inherently (re)produce a (neo)colonial discourse due to the epistemological praxis and the institutional hierarchy. The recently launched Journal of Islamic Art and Architecture (Edinburgh University Press) exemplifies this institutional hierarchy: of the twenty-five editorial board members, all are associated with institutions in the Global North, except for one European scholar at the American University in Cairo. This underscores the urgent need for platforms like this RT, alongside other emerging initiatives, which prioritize the agency of scholars on the margins to define their own historiographical priorities.
Western academic institutions have shifted their profile of leading scholars; faculties are no longer exclusively white European men but often members of the global diaspora. Although these scholars have successfully dismantled many Orientalist and colonial narratives, their positionality remains complex. By operating at the center they are frequently tasked with teaching and theorizing the architectural histories of the vast and super-diverse Muslim world. This institutional demand can inherently produce a form of theoretical and cultural flattening, whereby specific, localized architectural realities may be subordinated to broader globalized academic trends and Western curriculum’s need for a manageable comparative history. In this process, the complex reality of the local is at risk of being overlooked or abstracted to fit the requirements of the global center.
In contrast, scholars operating from the margins, whether in Iran or elsewhere, or those who consciously remain engaged with their own intellectual and local habitus, may enjoy an epistemological advantage. Although the margin is often viewed through the lens of institutional lack, it offers a site of resistance against the pressure to universalize. Less constrained by the need to bridge their findings for surveyable narratives, these scholars can remain attentive to the material, linguistic, and archival specificities of their region. By focusing on the local without the impulse to formulate a universal grand narrative, this “marginal” perspective has the potential to provide a more localized and specific historiographical narrative. Nevertheless, this position is not without risk: when research is conducted within modern national borders, subjects whose historical formations transcend these borders may become artificially fragmented. Such a risk, however, is not inevitable. Scholars can remain critically aware of these boundaries and resist methodological nationalism, as recent works demonstrate.
This roundtable aims to demonstrate that the margin is not a site of lack but a vibrant space in which a new generation of scholars possesses both the intellectual capacity and the agency to shape the next evolution of Iranian architectural historiography. To avoid producing a fragmented historical narrative, however, such agency must remain critically engaged with the historical formation of the field itself. In shaping this roundtable, we have therefore considered the trajectories through which Iranian architectural historiography has developed and the intellectual traditions that have shaped it. Although a full account of these developments would require separate study, the discussions assembled here reflect an awareness of this layered historiographical inheritance.
The basin and the currents of Iranian architectural historiography
Iranian architectural historiography may be understood as a broad basin, shaped by multiple rivers and intellectual currents that converge, overlap, and periodically redirect the terrain of the field. It draws upon a long tradition of Persian historical writing, from epic and dynastic chronicles to biographical genres such as the tazkereh, alongside later Orientalist and nationalist historiographies. Early streams flow from traditions associated with the Khodāy-nāmehs and the Shāhnāmehs, whose echoes remain perceptible in modern nationalist accounts of architectural history. Although chronicle writing long dominated, Persian historiography also produced more analytical works, most notably the Tārikh-e Beyhaqī. The tazkereh genre in Persian literature, devoted to the biographies of artists and calligraphers, may be regarded as a premodern lineage of art-historical writing.Footnote 5 The emergence of modern histories of art and architecture, however, was largely driven by European orchaelogical and Orientalist scholarship.
Orientalists paid attention to Iran later than to other regions such as Egypt, Mesopotamia, and India, partly because Iran was never formally colonized. Early figures, including Marcel and Jean Dieulafoy and Ernst Herzfeld, were followed by Arthur Upham Pope and André Godard, whose work played a decisive role in shaping the field. The presence and institutional involvement of Western scholars in Iran expanded after the World War II, and their influence continued through much of the twentieth century. A major reorientation occurred with the work of Mohammad-Karim Pirnia, who left a lasting imprint on the conceptual and methodological foundations of Iranian architectural historiography. Although Pirnia’s historiography reflected the nationalist and essentialist aspirations of its time, he shifted the discourse by articulating a localized framework grounded in Iranian craftsmanship, building practices, and literary traditions.Footnote 6
Although multiple intellectual currents, including traditionalist and postcolonial approaches, have since informed the field, Pirnia’s narrative arguably remains the most influential, even as it remains relatively unfamiliar among scholars in other fields, particularly beyond Iran. Another watershed moment emerged in the late 1990s, when reforms in academic curricula and the establishment of research-oriented programs redirected art and architectural education away from design-led training toward sustained historiographical inquiry. Today, although a local and ideological version of Traditionalism still remains mainstream in universities and state academic institutions, with continued government support, Iranian architectural historiography is characterized by the confluence of diverse streams, ranging from formalism and structuralism to postcolonial thought and cultural history. These currents increasingly intersect, moving the field away from a singular narrative toward a diversity of critical voices. As this transformation has been shaped by global circulations of knowledge in the age of information technologies, scholars working within Iran have become key producers of ideas, advancing diverse conceptual trajectories that are beginning to reshape the direction of the field.
Against this background, Rouhollah Mojtahedzadeh opens the RT by investigating recent dynamics in Iranian architectural historiography, focusing on the Reform Era of the late 1990s. Situating his discussion within the broader evolution of the field since the early 1900s, he emphasizes that the Reform Era was not merely a moment of shifting political discourse. It marked the beginning of a new intellectual chapter that reshaped the directions of architectural historiography in Iran. He highlights a set of academic events and institutional developments during this period, including the first Congress of Iranian Architectural History (1995), the establishment of specialized journals, professional conferences, and both governmental and nongovernmental associations and NGOs, all of which constituted a decisive milestone in the field.
Mohammad Gholamali Fallah situates the establishment of the postgraduate program in Iranian architectural studies (IAS) within the broader structural reforms of Iranian architectural education. Historically, Iranian architectural schools followed a design-oriented six-year integrated master’s program influenced by the École des Beaux-Arts, which largely marginalized architectural history in favor of artistic creativity. Although the National University (now Shahid Beheshti University) introduced a more context-oriented curriculum in the 1960s under the influence of the University of Rome, a systematic historiographical study of Iranian architecture remained absent for decades. The turning point came in 1999, when a nationally centralized reform replaced the integrated program with a two-tier bachelor’s and master’s model. This created the institutional space for specialized graduate programs, enabling the founding of IAS in 2005 at Shahid Beheshti University. The program has since been established across multiple top-ranking Iranian architecture schools. As Fallah argues, IAS institutionalized architectural historiography in Iran, training generations of scholars who have fundamentally reshaped the field’s discourses and narratives over the past two decades.
Together, the papers by Mojtahedzadeh and Fallah reveal the institutional importance of discourse shifts in the field . As recent decades have witnessed an evolution in debates and discourses, they also have marked a change in who drives these developments. Intellectual progress in Iranian architectural historiography is no longer driven primarily by influential individual figures; instead, it is increasingly the result of these institutional transformations. The emerging intellectual dynamics are therefore the product of collective initiatives and structural efforts, rather than the work of singular scholars, as was the case throughout much of the twentieth century.
The RT follows these overarching discussions by turning to more focused subjects and debates. Sina Zarei Hajiabadi addresses the periodization in André Godard’s L’art de l’Iran (1938) and its seminal legacy in Iranian architectural historiography. He shows how Godard’s temporal frameworks were not neutral divisions of history but deliberate historiographic strategies. Godard constructed a narrative of continuity as the core of his periodization based on an essentialist idea of the Iranian cultural spirit. This narrative employed periodization as a historical strategy that stabilizes cultural memory, manages and marginalizes historical ruptures and political disruptions of foreign rule, and selectively renders certain forms, regions, and temporalities noticeable while excluding others. In doing so, Godard’s periodization served the political agenda of the Pahlavi era in producing a nationalist historiography.
Mohammad Mahdi Abdollahzadeh turns to another influential figure, Mohammad-Karim Pirnia, whose architectural historiography shaped the field for nearly five decades. Pirnia left his mark not only through his formulation of stylistics and principles of Iranian architecture but also as an educator who trained a generation of scholars. He articulated a narrative of continuity by drawing on Iran’s cultural and artistic traditions, while also borrowing analytical tools from other fields, such as Bahar’s stylistics of Persian literature. Abdollahzadeh shows that Pirnia’s legacy rested on close attention to construction techniques and craftsmanship, and also reveals the assumptions and limitations of his framework. In particular, Pirnia’s idealized vision of Iranian architecture reflected the intellectual aspirations and constraints of his time more than a critical engagement with architectural heritage. Together, Zarei Hajiabadi and Abdollahzadeh unpack the enduring influence of two figures who decisively shaped twentieth-century Iranian architectural historiography.
Reza Masoudi Nejad examines the stereotype of the Iranian mosque through the case of the Iranian mosque in Mumbai (built in the 1860s). The mosque demonstrates the creativity of a Qajar master mason in a diasporic context and reflects architectural traditions of mosques across the southern Zagros region, which the article also surveys. Through this analysis, he challenges the notion of “the” Iranian mosque and shows how such clichés continue to mislead both practice and historiography. He situates the case study within a broader critique of modern Iranian architectural historiographies from André Godard to Mohammad-Karim Pirnia; although they offer different narratives, these works share a metanarrative shaped by modern Iranian nationalism. They privilege a unified national identity at the expense of regional diversity and the significance of the Qajar legacy in architecture, flattening the diversity of Iranian architecture, celebrating a distant medieval past, and marginalizing the Qajar era. The study demonstrates how these metanarratives continue to shape both historiography and architectural practice through idealized notions of “traditional” Iranian mosques.
Then, Haleh Hajyasini examines how the category of meʿmāri-ye sonnati (traditional architecture) was framed and institutionalized in Iran. She shows that the term is not a neutral description of the historical built environment, but a modern historiographical construct shaped by nationalist agendas. Tracing its trajectory from nineteenth-century Western surveys, through early twentieth-century narratives of continuity by scholars such as Pope and Godard, to its consolidation in recent times, Hajyasini demonstrates how diverse architectural histories were flattened into a single, static category. This framework essentialized Iran’s architectural past and established a distinction between “traditional” and “contemporary” architecture that continues to shape scholarship, design, and public perception. Taken together with Masoudi Nejad’s case study, her work highlights the need to critically reassess established categories to recover the dynamic diversity of Iranian architecture.
Although this roundtable is not intended to be an enterprise that conclusively addresses all current debates in the field, it seeks to initiate a conversation that may pave the way for future projects, such as a special journal issue or an edited volume. Its purpose is to engage with emerging debates in Iranian architectural historiography that challenge conventional narratives and the dominant geography of knowledge, particularly when such debates are mediated through Western institutions. The RT highlights how discussions originating within Iranian academic contexts, in dialogue with global intellectual currents, carry their own epistemic agency in shaping the field. Rather than aiming to construct a universal history of architecture, the new generation of Iranian scholars focuses on local and regional specificities, producing insights, methods, and critical approaches that enrich international scholarship. Ultimately, the RT seeks to foreground Iranian voices and contexts at the center of these debates, fostering more inclusive, nuanced, and globally informed conversations in the study of Iranian architecture.
Acknowledgement
The author gratefully acknowledges Dr. Mehrdad Qayyoomi Bidhendi for his pivotal role in developing this roundtable. His assistance in identifying contributors and his valuable comments on early drafts of all papers were essential to the project’s success. This roundtable would not have been possible without his generous support.
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