If one does not fundamentally deal with the reactionary institution of [architects] with the aim of crushing them, then there is no way to change the essence of that institution.Footnote 1
Just months after the 1979 Islamic Revolution was declared, the editors of Jāmeʿ-eh va Meʿmāri (Society and Architecture) published an exposé of architects they considered to be “corrupt thieves and traitors.” In the pages of that special issue, with characteristic revolutionary candor and Marxist overtones, they called out architects for collaboration with foreign architects and their collusions with the state (see Figure 1). As the monarchy came under fire, so too did the professions that benefited from, and that helped build, the transnationalism that colored so much of Iran’s transformation under the reign of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (the second Pahlavi period, from 1941 to 1979). In the preceding three decades, the definition of the modern architecture profession in Iran was instituted through a negotiation of domestic and foreign definitions of “architect.”Footnote 2 From the founding of their first professional society, The Society of Iranian Diplomate Architects in 1946, and its magazine, Ārchitecte (published from 1946 to 1951), the class of professionals that would capture the mantle as Iranian architects struggled to shape an internationalized professional culture.Footnote 3 Through the 1960s and 1970s, Iranian architects further articulated their stated aim “to strive, with enthusiasm, to become globalized,” through such means as hosting international conferences of leading designers from around the world in Iran.Footnote 4
Jāmeʿ-eh va Meʿmāri (Vol. 1, No. 12, November 1979), front page with headlines denouncing the architecture profession.
Thus, in 1979, with the Islamic Revolution in full swing, when the architects who were the editors of the Marxist-leaning Jāmeʿ-eh va Meʿmāri published lists of architects and their foreign collaborators, they were doing more than calling out their peers for cornering the market of high-profile commissions. They were making a direct connection between ways architects engaged foreign peers, institutions, and their politics. In the same list that damned one architect (Kamran Diba) for being an affiliate of the royal court, another (Abdolaziz Farmanfarmaian) is damned for his collaboration with Austrian-American architect Victor Gruen (the architect credited with developing the modern American mall).Footnote 5 What the editors of the magazine were reacting to was, in part, the internationalism of the architecture profession. Within the constellation of practices and relationships that reinforced the internationalism of Iran’s architecture profession, a particular set—those attributed to cosmopolitanism—seeded cultural tensions within the profession. This cosmopolitanism is something that Steven Vertovec and Robin Cohen locate “at the heart of political initiatives to establish frameworks and institutions that bridge or overtake conventional political structures of the nation-state system.”Footnote 6 In this paper, I focus on those actors and practices that struggled to “overtake the political structures” of Iran’s architecture profession.
The stories of cosmopolitanism that Iranian architects experienced leading up to the revolution are telling. They reveal ways individuals worked to transform their profession and to build a powerful relationship with the state.Footnote 7 Today, however, the story of architects in contemporary Iran has an equally, if not more revealing, story to tell. How architects seek and achieve cosmopolitan experiences in Iran today is a story of professional and political contestation on several fronts. The struggle for the culture of the profession is being played out by individuals, institutions, and the symbolic terrain of images in architecture publications. In this paper, I share accounts from a transnational ethnography of architecture professionals conducted between 2011 and 2013. The architects I interviewed and observed used their transnational mobility, networks, and affiliations to transform their profession in the past decade. Through migration, travel, and the transnational consumption of architectural ideas and institutional practices, Iranian architects leveraged their experiences to create substantial structural changes to their professional field.
By using cosmopolitanism as an analytical lens to study some of the politics of Iran’s architecture profession, my aim is to shed light on cultural practices tied to professional identity. This approach conforms to ethnographic studies of social groups, including professions, whose members struggle to articulate identities that empower them as individuals as well as technical and cultural workers. Though rooted in the historical development of the architecture profession in Iran, starting from at least the 1940s, the professional identity that is the subject of this paper is based on practices of the past two decades. More particularly, I aim to shed light on ways professional identity politics are manifest at individual, institutional, and state levels. The case of architects in Iran uniquely sets the intersections between these levels into relief.
Analytical Framework: Architects as Renegade Cosmopolitans
Professions and states. Depending on the country, the relationship between profession and state varies greatly.Footnote 8 In the US and, to some extent, the UK, the professions are considered “free” professions, which operate relatively independently from the state. In socialist countries, particularly in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe historically, the professions were tightly controlled by the state. Professionals in such contexts were often employed by the state. In between these ends of the spectrum, western European professions operate with a degree of state involvement. As a consequence of these political and geographic particularities, theories of professions need to be situated in their national context. Andrew Abbott and Magali Sarfatti Larson, for example, shed light on a capitalistic view of the North American professions.Footnote 9 They detail professions’ struggles to gain monopoly over the scope of work, for example, the design of buildings by architects. Most of the political work of American professionals is understood in service to this mission of jurisdictional control. By contrast, Elliott Krause focuses on Soviet professionals’ struggles to gain independence from the socialist state.Footnote 10 He shares examples of university professors inspected by the state for their ideological loyalty and the Soviet state’s stake in controlling the professional class as one that shares the state’s mantle in its ability to influence the population’s political and other ideologies. Similarly, Hossein Shahidi outlines the efforts of the journalism field in Iran in their contentious engagements with state censorship and institutional control.Footnote 11 Both extremes of profession–state relations are evident in the history of the formation of the Iranian architecture profession (summarized below).Footnote 12
To understand profession–state relations in Iran, it helps to disaggregate the state as a monolithic governing body. Terry Johnson does this when he challenges Larson and Abbott’s relationships between state and profession by leveraging Foucault’s ideas around governmentality.Footnote 13 Johnson argues that we need to stop thinking of profession and state as a duality. He reminds us that Foucault, “rejects the notion of the state as a coherent, calculating subject whose political power grows in concert with its interventions into civil society.”Footnote 14 Instead, in this Foucauldian perspective, “the state is viewed as an ensemble of institutions, procedures, tactics, calculations, knowledges and technologies, which together comprise the particular form that government has taken; the outcome of governing.”Footnote 15
In his later research on the links between professional and political ecologies, Abbott approaches a similar attitude toward the state.Footnote 16 He articulates a perspective in which states define themselves, in part, in reaction to professions’ efforts at defining their roles in society.Footnote 17 For Johnson, professions are one expression of the state—a part of the apparatus of governmentality. As technical experts, professionals play an important role in disciplining and regulating work and, by extension, society. As designers and builders of national monuments, cultural buildings, and urban spaces, architects can be gainfully understood through Johnson’s framework. The stories in this paper show how different parts of the state engage, censor, and compete with architects. This perspective of architects, as technical and cultural experts, locates their profession in proximity to the state. In contrast to other cultural fields, such as film, where censorship is more overt, conflicts between profession and state are less obvious in architecture, but equally undermining of professional autonomy.
It is important to note that professionals don’t just act as individuals. They leverage their associations, publications, and other institutions in their negotiations for power. In the Soviet context, Krause considers whether “professional institutions were capable of some resistance and autonomy, even under Stalin, and under those of his successors who shared a dogmatic ideological view of science.”Footnote 18 In the accounts shared in this study, architects leverage not only their trade associations but also their magazines and design awards in their political maneuverings in their profession. These are considered here as institutional tools that architects leverage. In the accounts that follow, I bring to light a range of such tools.
Notable studies of the architecture profession focus on the historical emergence of architecture as a profession since the nineteenth century, the transformation of professional practice in the twentieth century, the global divisions of architecture labor in the twenty-first century, and the place of the architecture profession in urban branding through iconic architecture.Footnote 19 Other studies call attention to the culture of architectural practice and the relationships between the market for architecture, professional and academic institutions, and architecture’s theoretical discourses.Footnote 20 In a seminal study of architecture in the United States, sociologist of professions Magali Sarfatti Larson examines architecture practice and architecture culture in the 1970s and 1980s. These decades marked the era in which postmodern thought blossomed in architecture. Taking root in speculative and theoretical explorations of semiotics in design, architecture’s postmodern turn quickly expanded into buildings that expressed a range of cultural values—notably, the rise of corporate architecture as a dominant part of our cities’ skylines. Larson reveals the connection of architecture’s intellectual development to the structures of its professional and academic institutions and, ultimately, to market structures of client and developer relationships with designers. Based on the context of architecture practice in the US, Larson’s analysis justifiably connects the profession with market structures. In the US context, the market takes place of the state. In the absence of a parallel study of architecture and the state, I situate this analysis as a contribution to studies of architecture practice in profession–state contexts outside the US.
A final point in studying the relationship between states and professions is that of professionals’ challenge to the state’s control of their institutions. Insight on this point can be gleaned by connecting studies of professions with respect to their states and studies of political engagement by professionals. One way that professionals challenge the state is by placing professional power beyond the state—geographically outside the state’s jurisdiction. In her study of the transnationalization of the economics profession, Marion Fourcade writes, “typically, we consider that the nation-state sets the boundaries of the ecologies within which professions emerge, structure themselves, and interact with each other. The main reason is that professions’ rights of entry are typically regulated locally, either at the national or the state level (as is partly the case with law).”Footnote 21
Fourcade’s comparative analysis of economics professions in the US, UK, and France at once affirms and challenges nation-based framings of professions. But by acknowledging the role of the nation state in shaping the culture of a profession, Fourcade’s work also allows us to appreciate that foreign influences can subvert the role of the state within a professional field. As presented below, the roots of the concept of cosmopolitanism come from ways individuals prioritized their connection to the world (cosmos) over their connection to their immediate political territory—historically, the city (or polis). Expanding on Fourcade’s study of the regulation of professions by the states in which they operate, in this paper, I consider how professions subvert their immediate political territory by prioritizing global connectivity. With this in mind, I next turn to a discussion of the use of cosmopolitanism in the context of professions, in order to better understand how the set of ideas and practices that define it may be used in negotiations of power between professions and the state.
Cosmopolitan architects and the Iranian state
The history of the founding of Iran’s modern architecture profession is one of westernization and globalism. Illustrative of this history, the opening epigraph of Iran’s popular Honar va Meʿmāri (Art and Architecture) magazine in 1969 proclaims, “our goal, in service to our homeland, is to recognize the art and architecture of its soil and to strive, with enthusiasm, to become globalized.”Footnote 22
Transnationalism in Iran’s architecture has roots that extend to ancient history. Popular archeological sites, such as Takht-e Jamshid, have found their way into the canon of global architectural history for representing ancient cosmopolitan symbolism in the built environment.Footnote 23 Islamic Iranian architecture similarly occupies a prominent place in histories of cosmopolitanism in architecture. The modern architecture profession, however, is sufficiently separated from this context, both in structure and in time, to warrant independent historiographic treatment. In the modern era of contemporary professions, transnationalism extends at least as far back as the architecture practice of Karim Taherzadeh Behzad, founded in 1928.Footnote 24 Records of European building companies predate the first Pahlavi period from the late Qajar period.Footnote 25 These serve as examples of the transnational foundations of modern architecture practice in Iran.
Building on these connections, overt transnational desires were expressed in labeling the new profession in Iran ārchitecte instead of the traditional meʿmār. In the first issue of the first publication of Iran’s architecture profession referenced above, Ārchitecte, one of the editors, Iraj Moshiri writes, “the meaning of the word architect is broader than what can be obtained from words like meʿmār and so on, this word has an international quality and in this sense, its use is fitting.”Footnote 26 Moshiri himself was a member of the first generation of professional Iranian architects, almost all of whom had transnational ties through education abroad. Moshiri’s generation studied at such institutions as the famed École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and were apprenticed under a generation of foreign architects employed to design and build Iran’s modern institutional buildings. Andre Godard, Maxime Siroux, and Nikolai Markov, for example, worked with the soon to be first-generation professionals (including, prominently, Vārtan Avānessiān, Keyghobād Zafar, and Mohsen Foroughi) on such projects as Bānk-e Melli-e Iran (ca. 1928) and the Treasury Building (ca. 1939).Footnote 27
Notably, the founders of Iran’s architecture profession worked closely with state patrons. In addition to the thirty-seven founding members of the Society of Iranian Diplomate Architects, fourteen honorary members were all politicians or members of the court.Footnote 28 The founding of the profession on cosmopolitan networks and state support reflect a historically pivotal framing of the profession–state relationship in Iran.
In the 1960s and 1970s, Iran’s architecture profession strengthened its relationship with the state. Architects enjoyed the patronage of the royal family and significant commissions from the modernizing monarchy. Statements of recognition of the role of members of the court abound in the profession’s main publications of the era.Footnote 29 Ashraf Pahlavi (the shah’s sister) is listed as the benefactor of several issues of Honar va Meʿmāri (Art and Architecture, arguably the most influential architecture publication of the 1960s and 1970s). Farah Pahlavi (the queen at the time), herself a former student at the École des Beaux-Art, is recognized for her support of the profession through participation in international architecture conferences in Iran and through her patronage. Or, as another example, powerful statesmen are bestowed such praise as, “we are grateful to our beloved Prime Minister Mr. Amir Abbas Hoveyda, an honorary and notable member of the Association of Iranian Architects.”Footnote 30
Empowered as the designers and builders of a modernizing state, architects enjoyed access to the world’s leading designers. Iran hosted the world’s first International Conference of Women in Architecture and two international conferences on modern architecture in the 1970s. In other state-supported professional events, leading architects from around the world came to Iran for international conferences on architecture.Footnote 31 Architecture, in Iran, evolved as a prestigious professional designation. Leading architects had high incomes and were revered for their craft.
In the absence of the existence of a history of the rank and file of the pre-Revolutionary architecture profession, it is difficult to offer evidence of class distinctions among architects at the time. However, from the virulent writings of a group of architects at the turn of the revolution (primarily in 1979 to 1980) against their counterparts, we might infer that there was significant contention within the profession and that that contention was connected to the architecture market. In Jāmeʿ-eh va Meʿmāri , a group of architects aggressively condemned their peers for monopolistic contracting practices, clientelism, and the political exploitation of channels of patronage. Contributors to Jāmeʿ-eh va Meʿmāri published copies of project contracts, memoranda, and images of meetings as a way to call out “corrupt thieves and traitors” among architects. Almost exclusively, the architects they called out were labeled as imperialists for their transnational connections and their ties with the state.
Following the Islamic Revolution of 1979, the Planning and Budget Organization (PBO) of the Iranian government stepped in to regulate the architecture profession. The socialist-inspired parts of the Islamic Republic argued that architects and engineers should turn their attention from upscale buildings to housing the revolutionary working class. With the immediate outbreak of the Iran–Iraq war (1980–88), the state steered architects’ attention to housing and construction to support the conflict.
Throughout the 1980s, architecture work in Iran entered a lull that resulted from both market and political forces. On the one hand, with the war in full swing, real estate and cultural development projects (such as museums and state buildings) were drastically reduced. On the other hand, with the closure of schools of architecture from 1980 to 1983 as part of the Cultural Revolution and the emigration of many architects from Iran, the architecture workforce had diminished. The profession stagnated and design publications ceased circulation.
This lull stood in dramatic contrast to the activity of architecture in the neoliberalizing economies of the West. During the 1980s, Iranian architects (fortunately, perhaps) missed the postmodern revolution that saw the architecture professions in the West supporting increasingly wealthy corporate clients’ desires to brand their way into power through large and lavish buildings and intensely symbolic, branded architecture.
A range of cosmopolitanisms are in effect in this summary history of Iran’s architecture profession. Vertovec and Cohen account for six ways cosmopolitanism is used as an analytic concept: as a socio-cultural condition, a philosophy or worldview, a political project involving transnational institutions, as a political project of multiple subjects, an attitude or disposition, and as a practice or competence.Footnote 32 In alignment with scholars of migration and globalization, I find that thinking about cosmopolitanism as a socio-cultural condition helps to shed light on the stories that the Iranian architects shared with me.Footnote 33
This paper is not in conversation with the stronger tradition of cosmopolitan studies that is concerned with global political ideology, peace, ethics, and top down institutions of a cosmopolitan world order. Rather, it is in conversation with the minor tradition of cosmopolitan studies that is ethnographic or biographical, and which focuses on ground-up institutions born from the transnational lives of their founders. This is the tradition of cosmopolitanism that Robert Holton attends to as “specific forms of cultural and identity and daily activities in a globalizing world … [where] ways of life of social groups such as professionals, migrants, travellers and tourists also cross borders.”Footnote 34 It is aligned with scholars such as James Ingram, who study “cosmopolitanism from below”Footnote 35 and is indirectly reflected in ethnographies of diasporic and transnational communities in Iran.Footnote 36
Inglis reminds us of classic cosmopolitanism’s roots as an expression of “the weakening of ties to the city-state.”Footnote 37 The core of the idea remains relevant for understanding the relationship between Iranian architects, their profession, and the state. Through looking and moving abroad and participating in foreign institutions of architecture education and practice, Iranian architects freed themselves from the hold that their country’s professional institutions had on them. That hold can be explained, on the one hand, through the influence of a professional culture as well as the power of professional and academic institutions. On the other hand, though, the constraints of their home profession can be understood in terms of the state’s censorship and limits of foreign influence.
The renegade part of this analysis comes in response to the Islamic Republic’s early alienation of the so-called imperialist West. In Iran, the state’s anti-West stance made cosmopolitan power a concern. In a sense, the rhetoric of factions of the state positioned itself in opposition to influences of western persons, groups, or institutions. As such, to become cosmopolitan, with a western orientation, was to go against the new cultural institutions of the state—such acts can be interpreted as renegade or as betrayal of the homeland. In this sense, renegade cosmopolitanism is used to call into question state versus individual sources of transnational power in shaping Iran’s architecture profession.
Methods: An Ethnography of the Architecture Profession
The findings shared in this paper are based on a transnational ethnography of Iranian architects begun in 2012.Footnote 38 Scholars of migration and globalization use multi-sited ethnographies to investigate cultures of people and groups that transcend single sites within a singular territory.Footnote 39 Studies of transnational cultures, such as Aihwa Ong’s seminal research on cultural capital among Pacific Rim migrants, serve as precedents for this investigation.Footnote 40 In Flexible Citizenship, for example, Ong conducts an ethnography of transnational Chinese individuals through an investigation of their migrations and economic activities. She shows how global cultures, political forces, and national identity interact through the lives of her subjects by employing interviews and participant observation. In order to investigate ways the culture of the Iranian architecture profession is transforming—and the role of transnational networks people, practices, and institutions in those transformations—the methods described below outline a similarly structured inductive and grounded theoretic approach.
Consistent with ethnographic studies, this investigation primarily uses unstructured and semi-structured interview methods.Footnote 41 Nuances of individuals’ thoughts, dynamics of transnational experiences, and stories of frictions within the profession and with institutional structures typically demand unstructured conversations such as those employed by Ong. Indeed, becoming cosmopolitan is a process rich with personal reflections and complex decisions (such as the decision to uproot one’s family) that are captured well by individuals’ nuanced accounts. Among other themes, the architects I interviewed told about the allure of the foreign, their professional transformation, and their struggles with professional and state institutions. The themes shared in this paper are those that coalesced around ideas of cosmopolitanism and struggle.
I conducted unstructured and semi-structured interviews with approximately forty architects in Iran, fifteen in Canada, fifteen in the US, five in the UK, and two in France. The interviews ranged from two hours to over three hours in duration. I initiated my sample through identifying architects in Iran who had studied abroad and grew my sample by snowballing. Consistent with qualitative social science research methods, I continued interviewing until saturation of target themes was achieved.
I conducted a qualitative content analysis of my interview notes and transcripts using multiple coding iterations. As an inductive inquiry, initial rounds of open coding of documents were conducted. These initial rounds were followed by an iterative process of refining codes and recoding. Ultimately, the codes were categorized and served as the basis of the themes presented in the following sections.Footnote 42
In order to protect anonymity, the findings presented below are constructed through amalgamations of various individuals’ stories. Furthermore, names, locations, dates, and organizations are fictionalized. In select cases where anonymity is not required, for example, where a public project with wide recognition is referenced or an individual is deceased, actual names are used. Throughout this process, care was taken to retain integrity of the themes that emerged from the fieldwork. The condition of anonymity that I shared with research participants afforded them freedom of expression that would have otherwise been compromised.
The architects I interviewed were those with some transnational dimension in their story. In some interviews, the architects told me about a political framing of their professional work. Many had studied or practiced abroad, some were educators, and some were active in the profession’s institutions. As measures of institutional participation, I considered individuals who were active in their member societies, publications, workshops and lecture series, or even underground gatherings. In these spaces, architects clashed with one another and with the state. I devoted considerable attention to everyday architects—not just those most recognized within and beyond the profession. The architects’ stories revealed a politicization of cosmopolitanism. The architects’ actions set the stage for seeing the cosmopolitan professional as an actor vying for the ability to influence their profession.
It is important to note that the term cosmopolitanism was not regularly used by participants. They used such terms as globalization, migration, internationalism, foreign experience, global exposure, isolation, collaboration, and networking. Cosmopolitanism and transnationalism are theoretical frameworks that I find capture well the dynamics I investigated. Whereas transnationalism reflects a broad range of actors, actions, and institutions, cosmopolitanism reflects a more narrow set of ideas—those discussed in the previous section.
Cosmopolitanism is not to be understood in opposition to parochialism. As the findings below intend to show, there is no inherent value to transnational vs. domestic actors or between architects (or architecture) that is more or less “cosmopolitan.” Rather, the focus of this study is on the struggles of everyday transnational actors in Iran’s architecture profession in the context of a state that frequently exhibits isolationist rhetoric particularly in cultural fields.
Findings: Reshaping the Profession, Mobilizing Power
The accounts below paint a picture of ways architects leverage their transnational experiences and connections to reorient the profession. First, I share stories about ways they become cosmopolitan—through migration, participation in international awards, and other means. Then, I share stories of ways cosmopolitanism is put into motion in the profession, as a source of authority, through transnational collaborations, and in professional institutions. Finally, I present evidence of ways cosmopolitanism is leveraged for political power, to reclaim control of architecture’s institutions and architecture work. For this, I draw on conflicts around design competitions, member societies, and design awards. These three sections represent, respectively work done at the individual, institutional, and state levels.
Becoming cosmopolitan
There were several ways the architects I met became cosmopolitan. Many Iranian architects coming of age in the post-revolutionary era expressed a desire to gain access to the world of architecture beyond Iran’s borders. Before the internet, for many, this was nearly impossible to do. Foreign architecture magazines and books would occasionally make their way into circulation among networks of professionals and students when a relative or friend traveled to Iran and managed to pass airport customs without their magazines being confiscated. One architect described a vital reliance on scant translated content: “There was one guy, Mozayeni, who would translate books, but after he died, there was no one in Iran left to translate foreign architecture texts.”Footnote 43 This statement, and many others like it, described the symptoms of Iranians’ lack of access to architecture design and discourse (from after the 1979 Islamic Revolution) that extended a long two decades through the early 2000s, when a loosening state rhetoric of isolation coincided with the introduction of the internet to Iran.
The arrival of the internet in more architecture students’ lives in the early 2000s gave them vastly increased exposure to architecture outside Iran. One student told about how he would find content online, translate it, and post his translations on a bulletin board in his architecture department for his peers to read. In that decade of the spread of internet access in Iran young Iranian architects began receiving recognition for some of their explorations in contemporary design with the advent of web-based design awards. Sites such as ArchDaily, the World Architecture Community, and the World Architecture Festival began distributing architectural recognition to architects all around the globe starting in 2008.Footnote 44
The recognition that Iranian architects started to receive through these sites enabled a young generation of architects educated in the 1990s and early 2000s to land jobs abroad. They were joined in their emigration by a cohort of architecture students that benefited from the loosening of Iran’s border controls during internationalization under President Khatami’s administration and simultaneously changing immigration laws abroad. The result was that dozens of Iranian architects moved to Toronto, Boston, New York, London, Paris, Dubai, Tokyo, and a handful of other cities in the late 2000s.
Mahsa, an architect in her thirties, told me how she got a job at a large, well-respected architecture firm in New York fresh out of Tehran. A year earlier, a residential building that her small firm had built in Tehran was placed on the shortlist of a new international design competition based in the UK. She says the organizers of that award caught wind of her project through images that had been circulating on the ArchDaily design blog. One of the large firms she applied to in New York had also been shortlisted for the same award. The partners at the New York firm saw the international recognition Mahsa had received for her work and hired her. To paraphrase, Mahsa explained:
The founder was surprised at how at my age [under thirty] I was shortlisted for the award in which their large firm had also competed without winning. So, they took me seriously. Later, I was given tasks that only project managers with decades of experience would be trusted with.Footnote 45
While abroad, young Iranian architects like Mahsa gained exposure to different cultures of practice, global teams of architects, and technical expertise:
There were people from Japan, Brazil, Italy, and this international group made it such that when I got back to Iran, I felt very comfortable establishing connections with people around the world … and I mention this because it broke open that dam that kept me from the rest of the world.Footnote 46
All the architects I spoke with shared a sense of opening and discovery through their migration, which is to be expected. The ways that those who returned to Iran, in particular, articulated their reasons for doing so was telling. While many architects stayed abroad, an appreciable number were drawn back to Iran. Pull factors were many and varied. They range from family reasons to professional opportunities for young designers in Iran.
A friend said an important thing—it would be wrong to take successful young architects like my wife and her peers out of Iran because younger architects and architecture students are looking to them as role models and watching to see what they do. They are liable to [the new generation of architects]. After I heard this, it helped settle me. I’m thinking about it now. In our work, we’re important here [in Iran]. Everything else in Iran aside, the architecture profession is moving in the right direction. There’s something happening here.Footnote 47
Several architects shared sentiments like this one from Masoud—a young architect who is part of a wife–husband team of designers. They were interested in the future of Iran’s profession. Another poignant statement comes from Mohsen:
For me I wanted to give everything I experienced over this year to these kids. I wanted to show them what contemporary architecture was and meant. The mission became life and death for me … I brought all the ideas that were racing in my mind to these kids in theory discussions in every class before we started studio work.Footnote 48
Even when working at a prestigious firm abroad, Mohsen said he was unfulfilled. He remembered his peers in Iran who did not have access to the world of architecture that he was seeing. And this moved him to return, despite his arduous struggle to get out in the first place.
With their return, architects like Masoud, his wife Yalda, and Mohsen brought back cultures of work they were exposed to abroad. After winning a design award in Iran, another young architect, Sheyda, emigrated and completed her graduate degree at a prestigious university in the US. Upon completion, she worked in the firms of several leading architects in the US and Europe. Three years after leaving Iran, she returned to Tehran to collaborate with old friends on an architecture design competition. From working with notable and avant-garde global architecture firms, she had become accustomed to all-nighters and the acute level of attention to detail in producing the set of competition drawings and other deliverables. The competition team in Iran that Sheyda collaborated with saw this and emulated it.Footnote 49 While not new to Iran, the culture of contemporary work that architects like Sheyda practiced in Iran was commented on by many of the architects I spoke with as being transformative.
Sheyda served as an important cross-pollinator of a foreign culture of design work. This professional-cultural exchange happened at the individual level as well as the firm level. One older architect, Mehran, had studied and taught at some of the world’s leading architecture schools and worked with a Pritzker Prize-winning architect.Footnote 50 He migrated back to Iran in the mid-2000s because he saw opportunity for architectural impact. Many of the young avant-garde of Iran’s architecture scene today have spent time working in his office. On many counts, his influence on a generation of leaders of the profession is immeasurable. Mehran noted that, “young architects coming through this office are trained in a way of working and a world view of architecture that stands in the face of much of their academic training.”Footnote 51 Several of the architects in my sample mentioned the significant effect of his presence in Iran on the profession.
Instituting cosmopolitanism
The same decade of the 2000s saw Iranian architects embedding transnational connections into structures of the profession. They did so through the profession’s publications, professional training courses, and academic collaborations with foreign architects. The publications, for example, worked to project images of a cosmopolitan architectural field to Iranian architects.
The independent magazines Memar (Architect) and Sharestan (a word for medieval Iranian cities, which can also be translated as “state of flux”) intentionally and energetically moved to formalize cosmopolitanism in Iran’s profession. Memar magazine started an annual award in 2001 for architecture that became one of the most talked-about events among the professionals I interviewed. The jurors for this award included luminaries in Iranian architectural practice and criticism. In the second year of the award, Memar began inviting expatriate Iranian architects, and eventually foreign architects to sit on the jury. The Memar Award’s first expatriate juror, Mohsen Mostafavi (then head of architecture at Cornell University), sat in 2003. The first foreign juror, Vicente Guallart (then co-director of the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia), sat in 2008. And in 2010, all the jurors were Iranian expatriates (see Figure 2). Each of these parts of the award’s history presents a milestone in the transnational expansion of Iran’s architecture profession.
Jurors of the 2010 Memar Award. Memar Magazine (No. 62, 2010).
Through these milestones, Iranian architects saw their work judged, at home, by foreign standards for the first time following the revolution. The process added foreign context and transnational legitimacy to the international architectural knowledge they had been struggling to gain access to since the revolution.
That first project I did, I think it was around 2008 … And I think I got lucky that the jurors of the Memar Award were Nader Tehrani and Homa Farjadi. And they didn’t care that I was unknown and young. At that time in Iran, no one could believe that a no-name [“gomnām”] architect could get the Memar award. All the people who had won were folks like Mirmiran [an established, older leader of the profession], and others who were well known [“sāheb-e nām budan”], but I was probably the first person that was young and unknown. That jury didn’t care who was what [among the competitors]. They cared more about the project. And the following years this continued with young architects coming and winning this award. This resulted in young architects getting more active, more daring, less afraid of trying new things.Footnote 52
Four years earlier, the involvement of even a single foreign juror on a Memar Award cycle had a transformative effect on the rise of an Iranian architectural avant-garde. In that award cycle, the Iranian jurors voted for a well-established, older Iranian architect over a young, visionary architect. The former was a senior member of the profession and in failing health. But a foreign architect invited to sit as a juror in that cycle gave all his voting points to the younger architect and none to the older architect. The vote resulted in the young architect winning the award in what was a shocking result for the profession. This marked the first of many times a young architect trained after the revolution would win the coveted Memar Award.
One architect argued that the Memar Award project ushered in an era in which architecture was appreciated as art for the first time following the revolution.Footnote 53 In the 1990s period of reconstruction, architecture was overwhelmingly, and almost exclusively, a means for developers to profit in the real estate boom that ensued. But with the awards of the 2000s, architects described a radically changed professional milieu in which they could be rewarded for doing architecture for its own sake. This was a significant break with the post-revolutionary past.
Beginning in 2003, Sharestan published special issues with in-depth interviews with successful expatriate Iranian architects. Bahram Shirdel was interviewed in 2005 and Farshid Moussavi in 2006 (both are globally recognized for their contributions to design theory and practice, respectively). Mehrdad Hadighe (then chair of architecture at the University of Pennsylvania), Nader Tehrani (then head of architecture at MIT), Mehrdad Yazdani (Yazdani Studio), Hadi Tehrani, and Nasrine Seraji (then chair of architecture at Cornell) all had special issues devoted to their work and their occupational histories (see Figure 3). In our interview, a member of the editorial board of a magazine that also published profiles of foreign architects shared with me his approach in exposing his audience to foreign architects and their ideas. Paraphrasing, he told me that,
it becomes very critical to choose the correct foreign people to interview and engage. Whatever we present will be quickly absorbed here [in Iran]. So, for example, we want to connect with Nasrine Seraji because she engages big ideas critically. Here there’s a saying that “the hen’s neighbor is a goose,” and we have to be careful of our audience’s tendency to blindly devour any foreign content.Footnote 54
By distributing a transnational form of recognition (through the foreign jurors and the awards) and curating for Iran’s architects the work of leading expatriates living abroad, the magazines instituted significant global connections in the profession that many architects emphasized in our conversations.
Nasrine Seraji, cover of Sharestan Magazine, Summer/Autumn 2011.
One such connection was made when one of the foreign jurors partnered with two architects in Iran and one of the professional member organizations to produce the Foreign Architect Workshop Series (FAWS, my acronym). The FAWS would expose Iranian architects to leading foreign architects through two- to three-day workshops as part of foreign architects’ week-long visits to Iran. Hosting the foreign architects was delegated to one of the thirty or so participating member firms. Each time a foreign architect visited Iran, one of the firms in this group was assigned to host that architect and to take them on a trip within Iran. The FAWS has led to numerous partnerships between visitor and host firms that have, in turn, expanded the supply and demand sides of Iranian architectural design work internationally.
Similar transnational connections took place in academic institutions. The University of Tehran collaborated with London’s prestigious Academy of Architecture School of Architecture (the AA) and the Department of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Both programs worked with Iranian architecture students in summer design studios in Iran. One of the organizers of the AA-University of Tehran summer studio described the genesis of the engagement thus:
It’s nothing official. Most of our connections with [foreign architects] happen by chance. Someone travels abroad, meets someone at a lecture, gets an email address. The summer [University of Tehran / Architecture Association (AA)] workshops happened because of one such fleeting connection.Footnote 55
This passage signifies the informal personal connections that enable international institutional connections in Iran. Whereas the state is either reluctant to establish such connections—or limited by sanctions—the architects I interviewed were eager and agile. Informal actors navigate structural barriers (such as economic sanctions) in ways that the state cannot. They become key institutors of transnationalism in Iran’s architecture profession. Significantly, everyday cosmopolitan actors are capable of establishing institutional connections across political divides that state actors often cannot.
Leveraging cosmopolitanism
Having instituted cosmopolitanism in their professional and academic institutions, Iranian architects encountered frictions with elements of the state as they leveraged their newfound power. The contest for authority between the profession and state organs has been in play since the beginning of the revolution with such groups as the Planning and Budgeting Organization (PBO). Some of the same architects that denounced their peers in the Jāmeʿ-eh va Meʿmāri article cited at the beginning of this paper were chastised by government officials for the political nature of their society meetings. In my interviews I spoke with architects who had been persecuted for conflating their professional and political intentions. Mahram described a milieu of paranoia and vulnerability for architects: “In the aftermath of the revolution, persecutions, expulsions, and imprisonments followed architects not just in the universities, but in professional organizations, and even in private practice.”Footnote 56 He had been working informally with a collective of architects conducting research on socialist housing strategies in foreign countries. He suspects this kind of work raised the suspicions of the authorities that held him for questioning.Footnote 57
It was in this milieu of profession–state relations that the leaders of the profession struggled to build institutional power. One architect described how domestic impediments to the profession’s development far outweighed the barriers placed on design and development by international sanctions: “[architects] are subject to two sanctions: internal and external … or domestic and foreign. The domestic are much worse.”Footnote 58
In their attempts to better their domestic situation, Iran’s architects aggressively sought to regain control of their trade’s institutions. In the mid-1990s, the PBO relented. No longer seeing architects as a political threat, the PBO granted them a seat at the table in governing their own trade.Footnote 59 Nevertheless, by sharing governance of the building industry with six other disciplines (including the civil engineering professions), the power of architects was diluted.Footnote 60
As a result, factions of architects sought independent power through various member societies. But, as one architect cautioned, “in other fields, state people have infiltrated professional organizations or started parallel organizations. This hasn’t happened in architecture yet, but it could. There’s also the issue of the PBO setting a standard for new organizations and that being limiting and unifying.”Footnote 61
One confrontation between an independent professional organization and a state-led organization played out on the transnational stage. The International Union of Architects (UIA) recruits member organizations from countries around the world. They do not, however, work formally with state organizations. Ehsan, a part of the leadership of a prominent independent Iranian architecture member society, registered his organization as Iran’s representative organization in the UIA. He chuckled when he recalled how at an international congress of UIA member organization in Turkey his group’s delegation got seats in the assembly whereas the state-backed organization’s delegation had to watch from the sidelines.Footnote 62 And this was after much contention between the two groups. In an example of overt profession–state confrontation, Ehsan described how he leveraged the cosmopolitan institution of the UIA to strong-arm the state-backed association of architects.
Whereas the professional societies were a site of victory for cosmopolitan architects, the universities remained a more contested terrain. As a prominent site of ideological and social formation, the universities vetted faculty for their ideological positions. Some of the architects I interviewed lost positions or were expelled from the universities. For example, Setareh explained,
the Dean asked what my thesis at [a prestigious foreign university] was on. I told him it was about the impacts of the Cultural Revolution on Iranian architecture. And I knew the Dean was a member of the council that implemented the Cultural Revolution in the universities. He took it personally, dismissed my thesis and said he didn’t respect [my alma mater]. So I told him that I didn’t respect the Dean or his school … and that was that.Footnote 63
Similar demands for ideological obedience from the profession’s champions of cosmopolitanism also occurred around Iran’s popular architecture magazines. These magazines and their awards played a tremendous role in bringing cosmopolitanism to the profession in the 2000s. When one magazine published images of their female jurors without hair covering, an editor received calls from the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance (Vezārat-e Farhang va Ershād-e Eslāmi, VFEE). The editor told me about the “conflict between [VFEE’s] ideas of Islamic Iranian architecture, and what I saw as my role to respond sharply.”Footnote 64 In the same conversation, in reflecting on the political leverage of architects, the editor told me, “[everyday actors] were never given attention by [state actors]. These are the people in field of architecture, the humanities, and so on, that are making transformations despite not being people with political clout.”Footnote 65 For the kinds of cosmopolitan content he placed in his magazine, the editor received minor threats, which he dismissed. Such magazines remain a significant source of transnational influence in Iran’s architecture profession.
Indeed, the visual domain, as mediated by magazines, is recognized as a significant arbiter of transnational and cosmopolitan imagination. Minoo Moallem reminds us of the cultural power of the transnational production and consumption of visual and textual content.Footnote 66 Bronislaw Szerszynski and John Urry explore ways visual media offers the cosmopolitan experience of “[exploring] the world from afar.”Footnote 67 Iran’s architecture publications capitalize on this. Through their contrasting content, state ministry-backed and independent magazines reveal conflicting imagery vividly (see Figure 4). These magazines regularly depict images from design competitions, gatherings, and ceremonies. On heavy, glossy (expensive), and well-designed pages, architects (and other design professionals and students) across the country witness and consume the dress, manner, inclusivity, and culture of the respective factions of the design profession. In the comparison in Figure 4, we see the dramatically different depictions of two award ceremonies—one led by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development and the other by an independent architecture news organization.
Award ceremonies for (left) Ministry of Housing and Urban Design award ceremony, and (right) an independent architecture news organization's award ceremony.
The power of design magazines is also manifest in design competitions. In the 1990s, a large design competition for a cultural institution to occupy one of Tehran’s prime undeveloped sites was launched. The winning project would be canonized among the great projects of contemporary Iranian architecture. Fittingly, the winner of the competition was Naqsh-e Jahan-Pars, one of Iran’s leading architecture firms, founded by Hadi Mirmiran (1945–2006). With his name on a number of Iran’s embassies in foreign countries, his work is emblematic of a homegrown, Iranian cosmopolitanism: “I belong to a movement that aims to continue the evolution of architecture in this ancient land and to find its own place in the global context.”Footnote 68
Mirmiran’s winning design was depicted on the cover of the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development sponsored magazine, Abadi (Settlement) (see Figure 5). But the project was not built. While there are many reasons that could result in a winning design not being built, what many architects believed to be the reason is significant for this analysis. Mirmiran’s design built heavily on modernist interpretations of pre-Islamic Iranian architecture concepts and themes. A number of architects told me that the VFEE was not willing to develop such a prominent site with architecture that not only did not communicate an Islamic Iranian identity, but contradicted it through a cosmopolitan nationalism that many would view as antithetical to the state. The narrative that the architects I spoke with shared was that the case of the Abbas Abad Hills competition served as an example of how state organs disciplined the cosmopolitan forays of their profession. (As a reminder, in this analysis, how interviewees make sense of such narratives serves as evidence of perceptions of the frictions within the architecture profession.)
Winning entry for the Abbas Abad Cultural Centers competition, by Hadi Mirmiran, Abadi Magazine (Spring 1994).
Cosmopolitanism and Professional Power
At the time of writing this conclusion, a cousin from Iran shared a TEDx Tehran clip with me. It was a speech by a young Iranian architect who had recently designed an award-winning bridge/pedestrian mall/garden located prominently in Tehran.Footnote 69 The event is choreographed and presented much like the TED talks that audiences around the world are familiar with. From the stage décor, to the speaker’s invisible headset, to the shots panning across the audience lit in dark blue, the event speaks to a well-executed, TED-flavored transnationalism. At the end of her talk, the architect, Leila Araghian, shares two important effects that her project had:
Regarding construction, the Nature Bridge could introduce a new standard level [sic.].Footnote 70 I haven’t heard such a mega project like this one which has this complexity, precision, and quality in whole country, while they have the message that these projects don’t seem executable, today, are executable. The other point that I hadn’t thought of were the global reaction to it and a great deal of media attention. It could depict a positive, beautiful, and developed look of us and our country to the world.Footnote 71
The architect is participating in several forms of transnationalism simultaneously: through her stint of education in Canada, her dress and manner of presentation, her architecture, and her ideas about the national impact of her work on the Iranian architecture profession.
Like her, the architects I spent time with in this ethnographic project leverage transnational experiences and connections to articulate cosmopolitanism in their profession. Their migrations, writings, competitions, and even their architecture are all forms of expression. In exploring the frictions between such forms of expression and the isolationist tendencies of organs of the state (such as ministries, officials, and university administrators), this essay highlights some of the cultural struggles of Iran’s architecture profession. The excerpts from architects’ stories above show how frictions between the state and the profession have evolved. The frictions span a varied terrain that includes trade publications, award ceremonies, member societies of the profession, membership in transnational professional organizations, and architectural form.
A cause of friction between the architecture profession and the state is cosmopolitanism. Where organs of the state desire control over a national definition of architecture practice, the architects I spoke with desire transnational connectivity. Architects moving abroad, finding inspiration in the transnationalism of foreign firms, and moving back to Iran to share it with their peers is evidence of this. Covers of Iran’s most prominent architecture magazines showcasing expatriate Iranian architects are evidence of this. Award-winning architecture that privileges cosmopolitan identity over a state-prescribed visual identity is evidence of this. And even strong-arming state-backed organizations from dominating the governance of the profession is evidence of this.
Furthermore, inasmuch as a handful of architects have managed institutional connections where the state was unable because of sanctions, these architects have demonstrated the power of cosmopolitanism not just in subverting the state, but in subverting structural barriers such as economic sanctions. In this way, the cosmopolitanism of select architects amplifies what Mihaela Nedelcu describes as, “a number of everyday contexts [that] have acquired a transnational dimension, not only for migrants but also for non-migrant populations, with the latter experiencing transnational phenomena without the concurring spatial mobility.”Footnote 72 The renegade cosmopolitan architects of this study not only shape the profession of architecture for themselves, but they do so for their peers through institutional channels. And, ultimately, they do so for the whole field of architecture in Iran.
ORCID
Shawhin Roudbari http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1964-7069
