The term meʿmāri-ye sonnati (traditional architecture) occupies a central place in contemporary discourse on Iranian architecture. It is invoked across academic publications, pedagogical materials, professional debates, and public conversations with a confidence that presumes a shared understanding of its meaning. Yet this familiarity is deceptive. Despite its widespread use and apparent self-evidence, its connotations remain imprecise.
This conceptual instability traces back to the term’s very inception. Although sonnat and sonnati, along with their European equivalents, “tradition” and “traditional/traditionnel,” have long appeared in writings on Iranian architecture, their implications have never been fixed; each adoption has recalibrated their scope and orientation. The persistent and almost effortless use of meʿmāri-ye sonnati has gradually endowed it with an aura of stability, producing significant epistemological consequences; it encourages retrospective readings of the past and narrows alternative narratives within the field.
Recognizing the historical formation of this term opens the possibility of reassessing its authority. In this article, I approach meʿmāri-ye sonnati not as a neutral descriptor, but as a historiographical construct. By tracing its genealogy, I examine how its various meanings were articulated under shifting intellectual conditions and how it came to appear coherent and stable despite its underlying conceptual elasticity. My focus remains on the textual and discursive operations through which sonnat and meʿmāri-ye sonnati took shape and circulated within Iranian architectural narratives. External influences and contextual references are invoked solely to illuminate these texts and are limited to times at which they bear directly on disciplinary debates, without extending into broader discussions.
To trace the emergence and evolution of this term and its conceptual interplay with Western historiography, the discussion begins with world architecture surveys of the mid-nineteenth century, when Persian monuments first entered modern narratives of architectural history. The study then follows the concept’s chronological trajectory in Iranian academia as reflected in major scholarly publications, from the use of tradition in foundational Western studies of the early twentieth century to the adoption of sonnat in midcentury nationalist discourse, and finally to the crystallization of meʿmāri-ye sonnati in 1970 Iranian scholarship. The study excludes the postrevolutionary era from its primary scope, limiting coverage to a general overview because the term’s later conflation with ideology, practice, and policy presents unique complexities that demand a separate line of inquiry. The discussion pauses at key texts that either introduced new uses of the terms or marked conceptual turning points in their application.
By examining how this term came to govern the Iranian architectural discourse, this article clarifies the intellectual frameworks that continue to shape the field, opening a space to rethink inherited vocabularies and move toward a more generative engagement with Iran’s architectural past.
“Tradition” in the First Modern Narratives of Persian Architecture
Western engagement with Persian monuments appears in early travelogues and antiquarian writing, but academic attention intensified over the nineteenth century, as these structures began to feature more prominently in the emerging disciplines of archaeology and art history. Specifically, the new genre of world architecture surveys, pioneered by historians such as James Fergusson, Wilhelm Lübke, and Franz Kugler, provided the first systematic treatment of Persian architecture as a subject of architectural history.Footnote 1 For half a century, these publications shaped the corpus that later Western scholars of Iranian art and architecture, including Ernst Herzfeld, Arthur Upham Pope, and André Godard, would inherit. These surveys established not only the material basis for early twentieth-century studies but also the interpretive habits and vocabulary through which the material was first discussed. Therefore, they form a crucial point of departure for tracing the concept of “tradition” from its entry into historical narratives of Iranian architecture.
The first historians of world architecture operated within conceptual conventions already circulating in Western scholarship, drawing on the prevailing terminology when presenting Iran’s architectural past. Their accounts relied on the technical language of “style” and “epoch” to articulate temporal divisions and comparative assessments; consequently, they had little reason to rely on “tradition” as a primary historiographical framework. When the term does appear, it reflects the broader, nontechnical understanding of the period: it is used in varied and occasionally inconsistent ways to describe customary practices, local norms, cultural continuities, or recurring methods of building. These are descriptive usages rather than organizing principles, revealing that “tradition” had not yet acquired the analytical or temporal weight it would later assume. Tracing these early instances is vital, however, because they introduced the term into the discourse in forms that later scholars would eventually reshape and amplify.
For example, in The Illustrated Handbook of Architecture (1855), James Fergusson occasionally refers to “traditions of place,” but more often uses “tradition” synonymously with received historical accounts or hearsay. He evokes this meaning in his chapter on “Sassanian architecture” when attempting to date the ruins of the palace at al-Hadhr (Hatra).Footnote 2 Auguste Choisy similarly employs “tradition” as a near synonym for customary history in Histoire de l’Architecture (1899), linking it to the practices of specific peoples and cultures such as Mesopotamian or Indian traditions. Crucially, he also applies the term to construction and technique. This usage appears in his chapter on “Perse” (Persia), in which he explains the columns of the Sarvistān palace by referring to traditions locales, and cites a tradition de la construction voûtée (tradition of vaulted construction) in his account of Sassanian architecture.Footnote 3 Despite the frequent appearance of the word in these works, the compound expression “traditional architecture” does not appear to have formed part of the standard vocabulary of the period, either in relation to Persia or to other civilizations.
“Tradition” as the Conceptual Scaffolding of the Narrative of Continuity
Although excavation reports and world architecture surveys offered scattered references to Persian architecture, they never assigned the material a clearly defined place or treated it as a distinct subject of study.Footnote 4 In the early twentieth century, however, scholars such as Arthur Upham Pope, André Godard, and Ernst Herzfeld began to move beyond presenting isolated monuments or episodic regional examples. Despite their differing institutional positions and methodologies, these figures shared a common ambition: to legitimize Persian architecture as a specialized, coherent field of inquiry.Footnote 5 Their work unfolded within a broader nationalistic climate that encouraged framing the country’s architectural past as a unified and emblematic heritage. By defining the geographical and historical scope of Persian art and architecture and consolidating an exemplary corpus, they gave the field clear contours. Finally, Persian architecture could be treated as an independent historiographical object. Crucially, the construction of this field depended on a narrative of “continuity” and internal coherence. This comprehensive narrative was sustained by a network of essentialist concepts such as the “spirit” and “authenticity” of Persian architecture that encouraged interpreting diverse works as expressions of a stable cultural identity, at times even suggesting an intrinsic national trait or “element.”Footnote 6 Concepts like “characteristics,” “determinants,” and “principles” emerged as governing criteria through which historians sought to define what was distinctively “Persian.”Footnote 7 These ideas, pivotal in the works of Pope and Godard, would later become integral to the narratives articulated by prominent scholars like Mohammad Karim Pirnia, whose contributions are examined in the following sections.
The idea of tradition served as the conceptual anchor for these assertions of continuity. Although it echoed the descriptive usages of the nineteenth century, its connotation subtly expanded, drawing inherited practices into a cohesive historical lineage. “Architectural traditions” were increasingly paired with notions of “constants,” “enduring qualities,” and “persistent features.” In this way, the term helped draw heterogeneous materials from across broad historical and geographical spans into a shared narrative of survival.
A closer examination of the foundational texts reveals this function. In Pope and Ackerman’s Survey of Persian Art (1938–39), references to the “traditions of Persian architecture” appear alongside artistic and aesthetic traditions, applying the term to inherited craft methods and recurring forms. Most notably, Pope attributes a “traditional character” to Persian art by arguing for its “unity,” “genuine individuality,” and “spirit.”Footnote 8 Similarly, Herzfeld’s Iran in the Ancient East (1941) uses “tradition” to denote collective memory, regional designations (e.g., Mesopotamian traditions), and recurring artistic styles and forms.Footnote 9 In L’Art de l’Iran (1962), Godard employs the term with even greater breadth: he uses it to denote persistent social or cultural practices (sometimes with explicit religious connotations, such as Sunna and Hadith), as well as stylistic lineages and construction techniques, from Sassanian vaults to Islamic minarets.Footnote 10 Despite the variety of these applications, they share a singular historiographical function: “tradition” operates as a versatile descriptor that validates the notion of historical persistence across timelines.
By the middle of the twentieth century, this specific usage had stabilized. Donald N. Wilber’s Architecture of Islamic Iran: The Il-Khānid Period (1955) illustrates this standardization. Wilber uses “tradition” to describe the enduring practices of itinerant artisans and technical elements like brick vaults and domes, presenting them as inherited methods maintained through habitual practice.Footnote 11 In doing so, he confirms that “tradition” had become the standard mechanism for narrating the resilience of Persian architectural identity.
National Architecture and Sonnathā-ye Meʿmāri
Tradition gradually found its Persian equivalent in sonnat, entering the discourse largely through translations of earlier authoritative histories of Persian art and architecture. Although older Persian texts rarely employed this term in relation to architecture, by the late 1950s it had begun to appear in the writings of Iranian archaeologists, art historians, and architects. However, a closer examination reveals that this usage often remained tied to general notions of national customs, manners, or religious beliefs, rather than to specific construction methods or stylistic criteria.
Early usages often situated tradition within the broader context of religious beliefs and social customs, establishing a backdrop against which architectural heritage was discussed. In a 1955 article for Bānk-e Sākhtemāni (Construction Bank), Pirnia argued for the preservation of “national traditions” (sonan-e melli), positioning them alongside religious beliefs (aqāyed-e mazhabi) and customs (rosum) as determinants of architectural style.Footnote 12 This concern for preservation soon evolved into more specific inquiries regarding historical continuity. Writing for the same journal two years later, archaeologist Mohammad-Taqi Mostafavi utilized the term “old architectural traditions” (sonan-e meʿmāri-ye qadim) to identify the persistence of pre-Islamic forms and beliefs in the Islamic period.Footnote 13 This focus on long-standing lineage continued in the 1960s journal Honar va Mardom (Art and People); Yahyā Zokā attributed the palace iwan to a “long-lasting royal tradition” (sonnat-e dirin-e saltanati), associating various arts and building crafts with the preservation of such traditions, whereas Akbar Tajvidi emphasized the authenticity of “ancient Iranian artistic traditions” (sonnathā-ye honari-ye bāstāni), explicitly linking these values to architectural examples.Footnote 14
These early Persian usages of sonnat across multiple historical disciplines aligned with the largely descriptive meanings of tradition familiar from earlier Western scholarship; it was, however, within the architectural discourse that sonnat first began to acquire a more explicitly theoretical function. This conceptual shift became visible in debates that linked historical forms to questions of national architectural identity and contemporary design. In 1963, the journal of the Society of Iranian Architects republished an interview with the architect Houshang Seyhun, who described an example of an architectural tradition (yek sonnat-e meʿmāri) the visible expression of a building’s structural system on its exterior, and framed it as a “mindset” capable of guiding contemporary practice toward a “national architecture.”Footnote 15 The idea of an “Iranian architecture” had, by this point, occupied cultural and architectural circles for more than a decade, and sonnat occasionally appeared in attempts to articulate the tension between old and new architecture.Footnote 16 Such references typically introduced an explicitly national dimension, as in phrases such as “historical and national traditions” (sonnathā-ye tārikhi va melli), “local and national traditions” (sonan-e mahalli va melli), “traditions of national architecture” (sonan-e meʿmāri-ye melli), and “Iranian traditions” (sonan-e Irani).Footnote 17
On one side of the debate, several figures advocated engaging with the past to shape a national architecture, with sonnat contributing to their reasoning. For example, in his inaugural address at the 1966 seminar Architecture and Urbanism, Houshang Nahavandi, then Minister of Development and Housing, urged emerging Iranian architecture to assert its own identity rather than emulate the West. He drew on ancient national and artistic traditions (sonnathā-ye kohan-e melli va honari-ye Irani) as a source of inspiration for a new Iranian architecture and characterized historical national traditions (sonnathā-ye tārikhi va melli) as the collective memory of society.Footnote 18
On the other side of the dispute stood modernist architects who rejected superficial historical allusions in contemporary architecture. They usually equated sonnat with the wholesale emulation of the past and therefore deemed it incompatible with contemporary needs. This position is evident in Mohammad-Amin Mirfendereski’s contribution to the seminar Role of Traditions in Modern Architecture, republished in Meʿmāri-ye Novin (New Architecture) (1965), in which he cautioned against understanding sonnat as the formal repetition of past elements and instead proposed interpreting it as a range of cultural and interpretive acts.Footnote 19 Parviz Tofiqi had already strongly condemned the re-use of Iranian traditional elements (anāser-e terādisiyonel-e Irani) as “nauseating” (1964).Footnote 20 Neither author, however, elaborated on what constituted such elements.
Building on these debates, the modernist architect Vartan Hovanesiyan offered a more nuanced approach to sonnat. Writing in the late 1960s, Hovanesiyan was acutely aware that Iran’s architectural past was increasingly celebrated as a precious heritage and a repository of valued masterpieces. His opposition to the repetition of historical forms therefore required a careful engagement with the language used to describe the past.Footnote 21 Within this context, he treated sonnat as a deliberate rhetorical resource. In a 1969 article in Honar va Meʿmāri (Art and Architecture), Hovanesiyan employed the phrase “tradition of Iran’s past architecture” (sonnat-e meʿmāri-ye gozashte-ye Iran), associating sonnat with “thoughts, spirits, manners, and customs.” However, he distinguished his argument by emphasizing the temporal character of sonnat and its susceptibility to change.Footnote 22 By redefining it as an evolving phenomenon “subject to constant change like time itself,” he cast sonnat as the part of the past capable of supporting a forward-looking agenda, while explicitly rejecting historicist revival through terms such as “rigidity” and “regression.” In doing so, he opened conceptual space for a progressive architectural position.
Despite the intensity of the debates, neither discussions of “national architecture” nor the broader field of architectural discourse produced a concrete definition of sonnat, which remained persistently vague.Footnote 23 Sonnat was associated with a wide range of intangible factors, including “intrinsic human traits and social thought,” “personal faith,” “temperaments and habits,” as well as practices such as “local customs,” and “artistic acts.”Footnote 24 Occasionally, the term was extended to cover environmental factors, including the “built environment,” “climate,” “climatic elements,” and even “weather and building materials.”Footnote 25 Established in this way within architectural discourse, sonnat remained a conceptually open term.
The Emergence of Meʿmāri-ye Sonnati
Within this shifting landscape, the growing circulation of sonnat gave rise to new formulations, most notably meʿmāri-ye sonnati (traditional architecture). Although textual evidence of the term before the 1970s is limited, it was likely already present in architectural discourse.Footnote 26 Its emergence became particularly visible at the 1970 Isfahan International Conference, Interaction of Traditional Architecture and Modern Technology, where the conceptual expansion of sonnat into meʿmāri-ye sonnati, along with its inherent ambiguities, was brought to the forefront.
The event convened international participants from diverse intellectual and professional backgrounds. Architects such as Louis Kahn and Buckminster Fuller, whose approaches to history and modernity differed sharply, appeared alongside one another.Footnote 27 These juxtapositions echoed debates that had intensified during the 1960s, as confrontations between modernists and historicists unfolded across various professional and academic circles. Speakers frequently paused to distinguish between sonnat and sonnati (or, in other languages, tradition and the traditional) and to clarify their understanding of meʿmāri-ye sonnati (traditional architecture). The sessions revealed how the term had come to accommodate divergent meanings. Some participants emphasized inherited construction techniques and explored ways to sustain them through industrialized methods; others pursued philosophical or symbolic questions, and still others considered environmental and climatic concerns.Footnote 28 Several discussions addressed the practical challenges of integrating new technologies into Iran’s past architectural practice, highlighting the tension between modernization and cultural identity and foreshadowing the later debates of sonnat va modernite (tradition and modernity). Consequently, the conference brought competing interpretations of meʿmāri-ye sonnati into view, setting the stage for its mobilization by diverse actors across professional forums and publications.
One influential trajectory in the consolidation of meʿmāri-ye sonnati emerged from traditionalist thought; this conception of tradition differed sharply from prevailing historical understandings.Footnote 29 Within this framework, tradition was seen as the manifestation of timeless, divinely grounded principles rather than a legacy confined to the past. This perspective found architectural expression in Nader Ardalan and Laleh Bakhtiar’s The Sense of Unity (1973). In the preface, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, a central figure of traditionalism, describes Islamic architecture as the material embodiment of unity within diversity, repeatedly invoking terms such as “traditional architecture,” “traditional Iranian architecture,” and “traditional Islamic architecture,” along with traditional rules, concepts, and art forms.Footnote 30 Ardalan later adapted these ideas for a Persian readership in publications such as his article “Āfaridan-e nov” (The New Creation) in Honar va Meʿmāri.Footnote 31 Although nonhistorical in intent, the examples emphasized in both works are predominantly from the Islamic era, a focus that over time contributed to associating meʿmāri-ye sonnati with historically specific Islamic forms and building types.
A different trajectory gained visibility during the 1970s, as meʿmāri-ye sonnati increasingly appeared in conjunction with terms such as “indigenous” (bumi), “local” (mahalli), and formulations emphasizing climatic and environmental considerations (sharayet-e eqlimi va mohiti).Footnote 32 Farah Pahlavi’s 1971 meeting with the Association of Iranian Architects, reported in Honar va Meʿmāri, called for greater attention to the role of these determinants in meʿmāri-ye sonnati.Footnote 33 The journal also covered several professional forums, reinforcing the association between meʿmāri-ye sonnati and environmental context through specialized panels and nationwide events that either foregrounded the value of “traditional and local architecture” or articulated critiques of “local traditional solutions for contemporary problems.”Footnote 34 Taken together, these collocations suggest that meʿmāri-ye sonnati was increasingly understood within a cluster of environmental and geographical associations, circulating alongside its other connotations in architectural discourse.
Concurrent with these interpretations, meʿmāri-ye sonnati remained anchored in discussions of Iran’s architectural past. In past decades, this domain had largely relied on descriptive terms such as “historical works of architecture” (āthār-e tārikhi), “old architecture” (meʿmāri-ye qadim), “past architecture” (meʿmāri-ye gozashte), and even “architecture of antiquity” (meʿmāri-ye bāstāni).Footnote 35 During the 1970s, these vocabularies began to be reconsidered. Coverage of the Isfahan conference in Honar va Meʿmāri, for instance, documents the development of this shift.Footnote 36 Across a wide range of issues, meʿmāri-ye sonnati appeared with increasing frequency as a general label for architectural pasts. Its gradual consolidation in this role is evident in collocations such as “ancient and traditional” (bāstāni va sonnati), “historical and traditional” (tārikhi va sonnati), and “old and traditional” (dirin/qadimi va sonnati), in which the term began to align itself with, and partially subsume, earlier descriptors.Footnote 37
In 1974, the journal Honar va Meʿmāri published a retrospective overview of its first five years (1969–73) in the form of a thematic classification of its contents, a document that signals the shifting priorities of architectural discourse at the time. Of the eleven recurring topics used to structure this overview, two were explicitly organized around traditional architecture: “Meʿmāri-ye Sonnati-ye Iran” and “Mabāhes-e Fanni dar Meʿmāri-ye Sonnati va Novin” (technical discussions on traditional and modern architecture).Footnote 38 The inclusion of historical articles under these headings, even those that did not themselves employ the term, suggests that meʿmāri-ye sonnati had come to function as a broad organizing category for architectural history.
The further consolidation of the term as a definitive label for the architectural past is particularly evident in Parviz Rajabi’s book Meʿmāri-ye Iran dar ʿAṣr-e Pahlavi (Architecture in Iran during the Pahlavi Era; 1976), a commemorative volume commissioned to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Pahlavi state. Although the book remained outside the central canon of academic or pedagogical literature, it stands as a significant document for being an early Persian-language attempt to situate contemporary Iranian architecture within a formalized historical narrative.
To frame the developments of the modern era, Rajabi positioned them against the entirety of Iran’s premodern built environment.Footnote 39 In doing so, he reduced a diverse architectural heritage, spanning from antiquity through the Islamic period, into a single, monolithic phase subsumed under the label meʿmāri-ye sonnati.Footnote 40 His confident deployment of the term, treating the past as a distinct and concluded chapter, reflected not merely a personal analytical choice but the crystallization of inherited conceptual frameworks that had taken shape over the preceding decades and enabled such a totalizing designation.
Beyond the terminology itself, Rajabi’s framework reproduced a deeper historiographical premise. From its earliest academic articulations, Iranian architecture had been constructed as a conceptual entity defined by identifiable principles and a selective canon. This essentialist framing implied that once those governing principles were perceived as no longer operative, the entity itself could be understood as having reached its end. This logic quietly generated narratives of rupture, decline, or incoherence whenever the recent past was discussed.Footnote 41 Rajabi’s unification of this vast heritage under the label meʿmāri-ye sonnati consolidated (rather than initiated) this mode of historical reasoning, signaling the extent to which the architectural past had come to be understood as a completed domain. This understanding would persist into the postrevolutionary period, when eventually it would be reframed within new cultural and ideological contexts.
Problematic Postrevolutionary Proliferation of Meʿmāri-ye Sonnati
Following the 1979 revolution, the genealogy of sonnat underwent a decisive shift. The category of meʿmāri-ye sonnati was increasingly absorbed into the emerging discourse of meʿmāri-ye Irani–Eslami (Iranian Islamic architecture). Although the compound Meʿmāri-ye Irani–Eslami had appeared previously as a descriptive label in works like Rajabi’s, it was now rearticulated within a fundamental ideological framework.Footnote 42 This transition was twofold: first, a historiographical narrowing that positioned the Islamic period as the exclusive locus of authentic cultural heritage; and second, a strengthening of the religious overtones of sonnat, which now referred more directly to its Islamic usage rather than to its earlier, broader cultural and temporal sense.
This discursive instability is vividly captured in a 1985 roundtable in Keyhān-e Farhangi (Cultural Universe) featuring Mohammad Karim Pirnia, Baqer Ayatollahzadeh Shirazi, Mahdi Hodjat, and Mostafa Chamran. Despite the interview’s title invoking meʿmāri-ye sonnati, the discussion gravitates toward an Iranian Islamic framework shaped by postrevolutionary agendas. Pirnia, the established authority, uses the term sparingly, adhering to his preference for Irani or Irani–Eslami distinctions.Footnote 43 In contrast, other interlocutors slide between bumi (indigenous), melli (national), and Eslami, revealing that the vocabulary for the past was in flux. Yet a shared premise bound these divergent terms: the assumption that this architecture constituted a completed inheritance in need of revival; a logic that echoed the Pahlavi-era narratives of a finished architectural past, but redirected here toward new ideological ends.
By the 1990s and 2000s, as the immediate revolutionary fervor settled into institutional routine, the discourse fractured again. The dichotomy of sonnat va modernite returned to the forefront of intellectual debates, impacting architectural publication. A distinction emerged between heritage-focused scholarship, typified by the journal Athar (Vestige)* (published by the Cultural Heritage Organization), and professional discourse found in journals like Ābādi (Habitation) (issued by the Ministry of Housing). In this divergent landscape, meʿmāri-ye sonnati began to lose its theoretical specificity, becoming a generalized catch-all phrase used to validate diverse agendas.
In the contemporary period, this tendency has culminated in what may be described as the academicization of tradition. Over the past two decades, a sharp rise in scholarly production has both normalized meʿmāri-ye sonnati as an unexamined analytical category and expanded its semantic range to encompass an increasingly heterogeneous set of references. Rather than enhancing conceptual precision, this expansion has blurred the very claims to scholarly rigor that accompany it. A survey of major Persian academic databases, including Noormags and the National Library and Archives of Iran, reveals an exponential proliferation of publications devoted to meʿmāri-ye sonnati.Footnote 44 Yet this abundance points less to conceptual deepening than to dilution. What distinguishes this moment from earlier decades is not a fundamental conceptual shift, but the scale and density of academic production and the extent of its diffusion across scholarly and professional contexts.
Last Word
This contribution has traced the emergence and consolidation of meʿmāri-ye sonnati as a historiographical construct, showing how it gradually coalesced out of dispersed references, classificatory practices, and shifting intellectual priorities. Through this long process, a familiar expression drawn from everyday language acquired an authority that far exceeded its descriptive clarity. It came to stand as a naturalized representation of the architectural past, even as its content, boundaries, and intended referents were repeatedly redefined. By the late twentieth century, meʿmāri-ye sonnati had become a widely assumed point of reference for thinking about Iran’s architectural past, effectively unifying a vast and dynamic history under a singular label.
The trajectory of this concept reveals distinct phases of intellectual formation. As established, nineteenth-century world architecture surveys operated without it, relying instead on stylistic and epochal classifications. It was only in the early twentieth century that “tradition” was mobilized to construct a narrative of continuity for Persian architecture. Subsequently, the midcentury translation of this concept into sonnat embedded it within nationalist debates, before it crystallized in the 1970s as meʿmāri-ye sonnati; a consolidated category capable of accommodating traditionalist, environmental, and historiographical agendas simultaneously. Finally, the postrevolutionary era saw this construct absorbed into new ideological frameworks and normalized through extensive academic production.
Recognizing meʿmāri-ye sonnati as a construct rather than a neutral descriptor is a necessary critical intervention; it is essential for understanding the interpretive limits of the field. As long as the term functions as an unquestioned epistemological container, it risks obscuring the internal ruptures and specificities that have shaped Iran’s built environment across centuries. However, acknowledging this genealogy opens the possibility of reimagining these frameworks. By suspending the assumption of a static “tradition,” scholarship can move beyond inherited vocabularies to recover the historical plurality of the Iranian architectural experience, allowing for a reading of the past that is as dynamic as the history it seeks to describe.
AI assistance statement
The manuscript was initially developed in Persian and translated into English by the author. The author used ChatGPT (OpenAI) solely for stylistic refinement and language polishing of selected passages in the English version, including suggestions for clarity, concision, and natural English phrasing. All arguments, interpretations, translations, sources, citations, and conceptual frameworks are entirely the author’s own. The final manuscript was fully reviewed, revised, and approved by the author, who retains full responsibility for its content.
