Among scholars and historians of Iranian architecture, the works of no researcher have been subjected to scrutiny and critique by Iranian scholars and critics as much those of Mohammad-Karim Pirnia (1920–97). These critiques have at times been scholarly, but more often emotionally charged. Some have praised him lavishly, considering him the reviver of research on the history of architecture in Iran.Footnote 1 Others have reduced him to the status of a relatively uneducated writer, lacking proper academic training, and have outrightly rejected his views.Footnote 2 These debates are due to his active role in the field.
During the 1960s and 1970s, Pirnia served as the technical deputy of the National Organization for the Preservation of Historic Monuments (NOPHM; Sāzmān-e Hefāzat-e Āsār-e Bāstāni) and played a pivotal role in training a significant generation of conservators and researchers of Iranian architectural history.Footnote 3 Simultaneously, he was one of the first Iranian researchers to begin writing systematically about Iranian architecture, and he proposed a captivating and novel idea for the historical stylistics of Iranian architecture. For nearly sixty years, his name has been present in research on Iranian architectural history. His two famous works, Sabkshenāsi-ye Meʿmāri-ye Irani (Stylistics of Iranian Architecture; concerning the various architectural period styles from the Medes to the Qajar era) and Meʿmāri-ye Irani (Iranian Architecture; a detailed typological explanation of Iranian architectural works in the Islamic period), have been among the main texts of an academic architectural history education in Iran for almost three decades.Footnote 4 The former has now surpassed its twenty-fourth printing. The latter has been reprinted over thirty times by various publishers under different titles.Footnote 5
The debates surrounding Pirnia are also due to an imprecise understanding of his views. Despite his profound and inspirational influence on next-generation researchers and historians, Pirnia never compiled the results of his findings comprehensively in the form of a single book.Footnote 6 Both of his famous books were compiled and published by transcribing other works based on his seminars and lectures.Footnote 7 This very fact complicates the understanding, and consequently the critique, of his ideas. Alongside this, one must consider the particular context of Pirnia’s presence and activities—a subject often overlooked in most critiques and reviews of his work.
Era of Adversity
Pirnia was one of the first Iranian researchers to write on the history of Iranian architecture. He wrote his first formal articles in 1955, at a time, from the establishment of the first school of architecture in Iran until the 1970s, when there was no dedicated course on Iranian architecture of any architecture faculty. Even in courses offered on the history of architecture and art or the history of civilizations, there was almost no content on Iranian architecture.Footnote 8 In courses related to construction technology, Greek architecture was analyzed in detail, yet no mention was made of over two thousand years of construction experience in Iran. The situation was such that there was not even a competent professor or faculty person to answer students’ questions.Footnote 9
Naturally, this situation made research on Iranian architecture difficult and impoverished. The main sources for teaching art and architectural history were works by Western researchers. The share of Iranian art and architecture in the entire scholarly history of world art was so negligible that it comprised no substantial knowledge in the field.Footnote 10 Critiquing this situation, Pirnia points out that until the early modern era most encyclopedias made no mention of Iranian art. Pre-Islamic Iranian architecture was studied under the banner of Mesopotamian architecture; structures like Persepolis were described as part of Sumerian and Babylonian architecture. Post-Islamic architecture also was called Arab architecture. In universities, the pointed arch (qows-e jenāghi) was called the Arab arch.Footnote 11 Even Godard insisted on calling the hypostyle mosque plan the “Arabiyan plan,” despite the lack of noteworthy Arab architecture at that time.Footnote 12
Iranian scholars made negligent or minor contributions to Iranian historiography; the field principally relied on non-Iranian scholars. In Pirnia’s opinion, the situation called into question the authenticity of research in this field.Footnote 13 Unfamiliarity of Western scholars with Iranian culture and their biases often led to misunderstanding and inaccurate analyses.Footnote 14 This profoundly influenced articles and books on the history of Iranian art and architecture published during the 1960s and 1970s.
Most architectural periodization was based on dynasties and in some cases even considered the entire Islamic era as a stylistically homogeneous epoch, devoid of stylistic evolution.Footnote 15 Pirnia believed that such an approach was profoundly flawed and did not reveal the true evolution of Iranian architecture.
An Innovative Historiographer
Pirnia first published his idea of stylistics in an article in Reference Pirnia1969.Footnote 16 Around that time, three prominent histories of Iranian architecture were produced by non-Iranian historians: L’Art de l’Iran (1962) by Andre Godard; Persian Architecture (1965) by Arthur Upham Pope; and The Architecture of Islamic Iran: The Il Khanid Period (1955) by Donald Wilber.Footnote 17 Although Godard followed the path of past periodization and study, the two other works diverged substantially from earlier Western approaches. Pope, for instance, attempted research of Iranian culture in the context of architecture and art. He even referred at times to the spiritual characteristics and tastes of Iranian artisans.Footnote 18 He was a pioneering historian who paved the way for figures like Wilber to research Iranian architecture.Footnote 19
Simultaneously, the first examples of architectural histories by Iranians were compiled around the 1960s and 1970s. One year before Pirnia’s article on stylistics, in 1967, Mohammad-Taqi Mostafavi published the concise book Negāhi be Honar-e Meʿmāri-ye Iran (A Look at Iranian Architecture).Footnote 20 Mostafavi was a prominent figure in archaeology and the study of Iranian architectural history and had previously headed the General Directorate of Archaeology (Edāreh-ye Koll-e Bāstānshenāsi).Footnote 21 In 1971, concurrent with the 2500-year celebration of the Persian Empire, Mahmud Nasiri Ansari published Seyri dar Meʿmāri-ye Iran (A Journey in Iranian Architecture), more detailed than Mostafavi’s work.Footnote 22 The method of periodization in these two publications was noteworthy. In both studies, dynasties served as the basis of periodization, and the extremely diverse architecture of the Islamic era, spanning some 1400 years, was treated as a single architectural period. This division somewhat recalls the periodization in Godard’s Art of Iran.
The few Iranian scholars who compiled architectural histories during that period generally lacked strong theoretical foundations. Without laying out theoretical preliminaries, their views, approaches, and even classification systems were largely borrowed from Western historians. Scholarly impoverishment of the field was so significant that an Iranian researcher could neglect the identity of a vibrant architectural period.Footnote 23 This situation saw little improvement in the following decade. Pirnia’s stylistics differed markedly from the histories produced by his contemporaries.
Pirnia’s historiography had two pillars: principles for Iranian architecture and stylistics. He typically first described the necessity of compiling the history of Iranian architecture by the establishment of stylistics and correct periodization. This was followed by an explanation of the principles of Iranian architecture. These principles were gradually refined over time, becoming five principles, as follows.
• Human orientation (mardomvāri): Harmony of the building with human needs and proportions.
• Self-sufficiency (khodbasandegi): Utilization of vernacular (bumāvard) materials and available resources.
• Avoidance of superfluity (parhiz az bihudegi): Avoidance of useless elements, ornamentation, and extravagance in construction.
• Inwardness (darungarāi): Focus on the interior, related to both the building’s form and lifestyle behavior.
• Structure, construction, and modularity (niyāresh and peymun): Simultaneous attention to knowledge of stability, construction techniques, and materials (sakhtmāyeh) in connection with beauty and the use of specific, proportional modules and measurements (peymun).
Pirnia considered these to be principles common to all styles of Iranian architecture, and even Iranian art. He used them not only to introduce Iranian architecture but also to evaluate and assign value to styles. He would sometimes define architecture, art, style, and the nature of their transformation, and occasionally enumerate the schools (dabestan-hā) of Islamic architecture before defining the styles.Footnote 24
Rejecting dynastic periodization, Pirnia presented a new idea for the “styles” (sabk-hā or shiveh-hā) of Iranian architecture, both pre- and post-Islam. He would present the history of Iranian architecture within the framework of stylistics, based on six styles:
• Pārsi (Persian style): circa sixth century BC to the first century BC, encompassing the Achaemenid period and part of the Parthian period.
• Pārti (Parthian style): third century BC to seventh century AD.
• Khorāsāni: from the early Islamic period until around the fourth century AH/tenth century AD.
• Rāzi: fourth to sixth centuries AH/tenth to twelfth centuries AD.
• Āzari: late sixth to late ninth centuries AH/twelfth to fifteenth centuries AD.
• Esfāhāni: tenth to thirteenth centuries AH/sixteenth to nineteenth centuries AD.
In this manner, he partially freed the historiography of Iranian architecture from the structure of dynastic periodization. Pirnia, in his articles and lectures, indicated his indebtedness to the stylistics of Mohammad-Taqi Bahar. The terminology of the styles, the geographical connotations of the names indicating the origin or zenith of each style, and some of the chosen names and periods are reminiscent of the Persian literary styles proposed by Bahar for the stylistics of Persian poetry.Footnote 25
A notable point in Pirnia’s stylistic periodization was his emphasis on gradual transformation. He grouped the emergence, maturation, and culmination of formal change within a single style. For example, unlike many other historians, Pirnia viewed the architecture of the Parthian and Sasanian periods as continuous, and was able to observe the evolution of architecture in structure and roof covering—from beam-and-post structures to domed masonry—across these two periods as a unified trajectory.Footnote 26 Similarly, he dated the beginning of the Āzari style to the first appearance of external polychrome ornamentation shortly before the Mongol invasion, treating the Ilkhanid and Timurid periods as a single stylistic continuum, even though some of his contemporaries viewed Timurid architecture as more closely resembling Safavid than Ilkhanid forms.Footnote 27 This indicates a perspective in which the processes of transformation are perhaps more important than the final form. With this method, explaining the processes and their underlying logic, as well as determining the origins and roots of phenomena and works, becomes important.
Attention also was paid to construction techniques as stylistic characteristics, to the extent that construction techniques explained formal evolutions, challenging the conventional stylistic focus on form alone. Despite the common approach of examining stylistic features that often prioritized formal elements and their composition over technique and materials, Pirnia placed construction technique and structure as major features of styles.Footnote 28 Pirnia also addressed the issue of technique and construction in his principles of Iranian architecture with the concept of niyāresh and peymun, which encompassed structure, construction, and modularity. This fundamentally different approach demonstrates that Pirnia was aware that Iranian architecture could not be properly understood without attention to its technical characteristics. His position at NOPHM and his long association with traditional builders allowed Pirnia to become thoroughly acquainted with the techniques of Iranian architecture. This is why his explanation of the technical aspects of Iranian architecture is very detailed and quite different from that of his peers. He spoke about a modular system in Iranian architecture (peymun) that almost no other historian had ever described, and that still remains relatively unknown. Pirnia left an extensive, unpublished explanation on house design (barbast) and plans (kārshiv), in various modules, provided in lectures at NOPHM in 1986–87.Footnote 29 As to niyāresh, he assembled a wide range of topics, including types of roofing, the behavior and structural logic of various vaults, types of squinches, the geometry of arches and their drafting methods, construction details, various materials and their properties, and types of plasters, mortars (āzhand), and coatings (āmud). In considering each style he also addressed the technical characteristics of buildings.
Finally, Pirnia’s historiography is distinguished by its unique linguistic register—a deliberate use of Persian terminology. With particular sensitivity, he selected Persian names, terms, and terminology, creating an indigenous conceptual lexicon for Iranian architectural historiography. This is one of Pirnia’s important innovations. Language is the cultural connection between present and past. Constructing “indigenous” stylistics for Iranian architectural historiography required a set of names and terms originating in Iranian culture. Pirnia possessed a good aptitude for this task and also was well-versed in numerous sources of Persian literature. Instead of contemporary Persian dictionaries like Dehkhodā and Mo ʿin, he drew terms from well-known classical lexicons, such as Borhān-e Qāte ʿ and Sehāh-al Fors.Footnote 30 He also utilized oral sources and the vocabulary of master masons (ostād-kārān). Although some have criticized his heavy reliance on the dialects of central Iran (especially Yazd, his hometown), Pirnia was generally aware of regional diversity and often employed variant terms from different provinces, from Azerbaijan to Bushehr.Footnote 31 He was aware of this complexity and tried to provide different names for an object or action in various dialects. Collectively, these innovations enabled Pirnia to propose a distinctive and culturally grounded historiographical framework for Iranian architecture that continues to inspire scholars.
The Scholar’s Adversity
Certain assumptions in Pirnia’s work invite critical scrutiny. These assumptions, shared by several contemporaries, include the belief that Iranian culture, art, and architecture form a continuous and unified whole, encompassing all regional cultures of Iran, extending unbroken for millennia—even past the advent of Islam. He assumed that Iranian architecture emerged from Iranian culture, and in this respect, it belonged to the same family as other Iranian arts. Therefore Iranian architecture and other Iranian arts shared “common principles.” He described the unity originating in the principles of Iranian art and architecture, using terms such as “the Iranian person” or “the Iranian spirit.”Footnote 32 This necessarily required simplification. Although Pirnia acknowledged regional diversity in architecture, his principles, such as inwardness, and his discussions of peymun and architectural terminology primarily drew from the central desert of Iran.
Understanding his assumptions requires returning to Pirnia’s intellectual milieu. The dominant study of Iranian art and architectural history between the 1920s and 1970s influenced Pirnia’s thought and works. In many of his articles, like those of others in the 1960s and 1970s, one sees an effort—mingled with praise—to prove the worth and richness of Iranian culture and art. Two key claims underpinned this effort: first, that Iranian art and architecture were as valuable as those of the West. This concern with origins, imitation, and innovation was a reaction to long-standing Western narratives about the “East.” One observes in his articles and writings on art and architectural history of this period an unrelenting effort to demonstrate Iranian culture as the origin of another civilization’s works. For example, in reaction to some Western narratives, Pirnia argued for the influence of Iranian vaulting techniques on the architecture of French medieval churches, and discussed the origins of ancient Greek styles and their relation to pre-Achaemenid architecture in Iran.Footnote 33
The second claim was that Iranian art and architecture possessed intrinsic value. Pirnia explained that this value lay in the “functional rationality” underlying forms, which continued to make them worthy of study and attention in the modern era. Therefore, he focused his efforts on aspects of Iranian history and culture he considered important to a contemporary audience and most likely to attract their attention, even when his justfications did not conform to the reputation and standing of Iranian architecture. In Pirnia’s intellectual milieu there was an endeavor to present the views of a past scholar or craft tradition as congruent with modern science and technology, and thereby instill in the audience a renewed belief in their own culture, history, and identity.Footnote 34 As an example, there might be functional necessity for an architectural ornament, distancing it from merely aesthetic matters. Pirnia tried to rationalize the execution of ornamental mosaic tilework (kāshi shekasteh or moʿarraq) with a form of functional necessity: arguing that “if a dome is tiled from the top (tizeh) to the impost (pākār), it is not merely for decoration; rather, the tile serves as moisture and thermal insulation (panām). And if it is decorated with patterned and mosaic tiles, it is so that it can be repaired and patched; tilework does not have a long lifespan, and if it were monochromatic and uniform it could not be easily repaired and restored to its original state.”Footnote 35
It is as if he, and many like him, were constantly responding to the criticisms and views put forth by Western historians or the modern Iranian engineers of that period regarding Iranian culture, art, and architectural tradition. Of course, the shadow of modern architecture and modernist thought loomed over these responses. This situation particularly influenced the principles Pirnia proposed for Iranian architecture.
When Pirnia referred to the principles of Iranian architecture, he implied that these were what distinguished Iranian architecture from non-Iranian architecture. However, examination of the application of these principles to the study of architectural styles reveals that this is not entirely right. Sometimes, a particular style may lack one of these principles (such as self-sufficiency or human orientation in the Parthian style). Additionally, most of the principles can be found in architecture of other lands, such as khodbasandegi (self-sufficiency) and parhiz az bihudegi (avoidance of superfluity).
Pirnia did not derive these principles just from existing works, such that any mismatch between the works and these principles could undermine their very foundation. He regarded his principles as rational axioms, which he felt entitled to use in critiquing the architectural works of Iran. He even occasionally claimed that most works from a particular Iranian architectural style or period did not align with one of the principles of Iranian architecture. These principles themselves sometimes became the basis for evaluating works and styles. He even asserted that if these principles were observed in a building today, that building would be considered a work of Iranian architecture. The proofs of this were features such as poetic sensibility, abstraction (barsāv), a strong assimilating capacity, and a pursuit of diversity, which Pirnia referenced throughout his writings and lectures, although in the end he eliminated them from his principles of Iranian architecture.Footnote 36
Pirnia’s proposed principles were not uniform in their nature; some were descriptive of Iranian architecture as historically manifested, and others were ideal or normative, serving as a measure for judging the vicissitudes, right and wrong, of Iranian architectural styles. As stated at the beginning of Sabkshenāsi-ye Meʿmāri-ye Irani, stylistics referred to rational understanding and judgment of Iranian architecture.Footnote 37 Some of his principles aimed at conforming to modernity in architecture. It was as if Pirnia was striving to demonstrate that Iranian architecture lacked nothing when compared to architectural schools emerging daily in the contemporary world. The effort to establish principles for Iranian architecture recalled the manifestos of modernist architectural movements with their normative principles. If modern schools had manifestos, Pirnia endeavored to identify and articulate a set of principles for Iranian architecture. If proponents of the modernist movement—the dominant intellectual current of his time—asserted that good architecture must be functional and rational, he sought to prove that Iranian architecture throughout its long history has been precisely that: functional and rational. If modernists condemned applied ornament as superfluous, he characterized the ornamentation of Iranian architecture not as mere decorative luxury or a useless addition to the structure, but as something inherently useful, serving a tangible, material purpose.Footnote 38
Nevertheless, reducing Pirnia’s work to merely formulating a modern manifesto for Iranian architecture would be a significant error. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Pirnia understood well that research in architectural history could not endure or gain depth without a theoretical foundation. He recognized that a theoretical framework, capable of serving as a basis for the study of Iranian architecture, must be a system that encompassed Iranian culture and all domains of thought, as well as design, construction, techniques, structure, and materials. Ultimately, Pirnia may be regarded as an inspirational and influential researcher who, despite the criticisms leveled against him and the dispersed nature of his works, proposed important innovations in the historiography of Iranian architecture and, both through his ideas and the prominent students he trained, became a trendsetter.
