Reports of the US‒Mexico border wall and the design of migrant detention centers conjure images of infrastructures of separation. Such spaces illustrate too well architecture’s burden (and its complicity) when transnational relations and human rights are abused. But a welcome antidote to such exclusionary perspectives of space otherwise pervading our contemporary political discourse is found in Occidentalist Perspectives. Vahid Vahdat’s account of Iranian travelers’ encounters with European architecture and urbanism celebrates ways in which connections are negotiated across cultures and spaces. As we reckon with nationalism and globalism or with separation and connection, the history of tajaddod (roughly translated as renewal, and often used in reference to the experience of modernity) presented in Occidentalist Perspectives offers a timely argument. Through this text, Vahdat presents a nuanced and thoughtful history of interconnectedness—one that attends to ways that processes of othering create distorted views of people in far-away lands.

In Occidentalist Perspectives, Vahdat brings productive nuance to histories of Iranian modernity. He does so with a neat intertwining of Orientalist and Occidentalist perspectives. These perspectives converge around the writings of four Iranian travelers to Europe in the nineteenth century. Vahdat’s analysis challenges perspectives of modernity that fail to see the contemporaneity of the Occident and the Orient—as though the former progressed in time but the latter was held back. Importantly, Occidentalist Perspectives situates mutual perspectives of both spaces side by side. Vahdat hones his focus on the “transference” of ideas from farang (a reference to Europe or the modern West in general) to Iran, through his four travelers. He attends to how their preconceived notions of farang shaped their impressions there and what they brought back.

Vahdat uses the idea of tajaddod to frame his analysis of the Iranian gaze of European modernity. This allows him to emphasize the negotiation inherent in his travelers’ construction of their Occidental other. The Iranian experience of modernity “transcends a passive reflection of European values,” Vahdat argues. His analysis contributes to the growing body of literature in architectural history that brings nuance to transnational encounters between civilizations, cultures, and individuals who shape our built environments. In Iranian studies, readings of a more unilateral modernity in Iranian architecture (in the 2000s, roughly) have encouraged newer historiographic investigations (in the 2010s) that see Iran’s architecture and urbanism as part of multidirectional flows of travelers’ gazes, imaginations, and desires. Vahdat’s redefinition of tajaddod, and his examination of its experience through travel, contributes to this current stream of research on modernity in Iranian architectural history. (His intentional decision to leave out the political‒economic context of this tajaddod, while appropriate for this text, might, I suspect, be a gap addressed by an emerging trend in Iranian architectural historiography that attends to the political economy of urban development directly.)

Vahdat’s training in architecture and history come through in the content he provides for architectural analysis. For example, when writing about travelers’ perceptions of the qualities of building materials, from their strength to scale to symbolism, Vahdat offers design historians leads for further inquiry. As a historian of architecture and urbanism, he brings a wealth of contextual information about Iran and Europe during the period of study from his archival research to his consideration of ways that ideas about space and modernity took shape. His focus on actors, their perceptions, and their desires is well supported by his disciplinary background as a scholar versed in design and historiography.

Vahdat’s sources comprise the original travel diaries (or safarnāmehs) of four travelers, supplemented by writings of their co-travelers, foreign contemporaries, and foreign popular press accounts of their travels. His analysis also includes architectural historical evidence including drawings and descriptions of buildings and urban spaces. Contemporaneous works of art and images of architecture are presented as useful figures in the text. The book includes twenty-five figures (including maps, images, drawings, and paintings), a glossary of architectural and other significant terms, as well as four extensive and useful tables in the appendix that catalogue the travelers’ itineraries.

In the opening chapter, Vahdat presents an analytical framework that builds on theories of Orientalism, modernity, othering, and tajaddod. In the second chapter, he introduces his subjects—four Iranian men of elite society, traveling in the half-century following the Russo-Persian War that ended in 1813. He notes how Iran’s defeat in the war led to a period of introspection connected with a desire to learn more about the developments of the modernizing West. As such, his travelers’ accounts are framed as part of a commitment to “breaking the codes of modernity,” and to decipher “a kind of instruction manual to European progress,” at a time when Iran was forced to reckon with its defeat by the Russians and its loss of perceived supremacy.

In the third chapter, Vahdat describes his travelers’ encounters along axes of sociopolitical, spatial, and technological “wonders.” In this chapter, he offers compelling interpretations of travelers’ confusion between virtual and real perceptions, their measures of quantifying space, and the politics of representation. The fourth chapter is rich with descriptive and interpretive accounts of architectural and urban spaces. Here, Vahdat attends to such foundational topics in architectural analysis as material, geometry, ornament, scale, and use.

The text concludes with a return to the discussion of tajaddod wherein Vahdat engages his travelers’ experiences in discourses of modernity, renewal, and progress. There is a brief but helpful etymology of the word tajaddod and a history of its use in Iran. Vahdat concludes that “the social construction of Iran’s experience of modernity (tajaddod), deals principally not with its correspondence with European modernity, but with the internal consistency of long-harbored expectations about Farangestan” (p. 138). For Vahdat, tajaddod unlocks the role of Iranians’ own history and ideas in their experience and interpretations of modernity.

Throughout Occidentalist Perspectives, Vahdat offers creative interpretations of his travelers’ accounts. A number of such interpretive readings are developed in conversation with prevalent theoretical frameworks on modernity. For example, in his discussion on the politics of representation, Vahdat engages Timothy Mitchell’s writing on the exhibitionary nature of the project of modernity—as one that organizes, curates, and displays controlled images of development (and underdevelopment).Footnote ¹ Vahdat uses this idea to decipher ways the travelers wrote about the attention they received from crowds in Europe that gathered to see these strange and fascinating visitors. “[The Persian travel writers indicated] that they were not just an ‘ordinary’ spectacle, but were somehow violating their designated position within the ordered world of European modernity” (p. 67). Interpretative accounts, like this one, strive for more complicated readings of the processes that much historiography simplifies as globalization and modernization. Occidentalist Perceptions productively attends to the multidirectional operation of the transnational gaze. This is one of the text’s notable strengths.

With its focus on othering, modernity, and tajaddod, it is understandable that the text does not include substantial reference to the literature on transnational cultural consumption. Minoo Moallem,Footnote ² for example, treats the decontextual consumption of transnational cultural products in ways that could extend some of Vahdat’s analytical and interpretive findings. Such transnational feminist readings as Moallem’s offer a compelling indication for further research to complement what Vahdat has provided in Occidentalist Perceptions.

In another valid analytical decision, Vahid only summarily accounts for the broader political economic dynamics surrounding the travels he analyzes. He does this to focus instead on the aesthetic dimensions of the travelers’ experiences. Experiences of wonderment and “the complexity of fantasy” deserve dedicated space, Vahdat argues. And this is space that, perhaps, Edward Said chose to sacrifice in Orientalism in order to emphasize a more politicized argument about othering and the simultaneous construction of the image of a developed West through the creative production of an underdeveloped East. While Vahdat does leverage this decision productively by focusing the discussion of the book on impressions, imagination, and the gaze, I still wonder if some of the aesthetic analysis would stand in stronger relief against a backdrop of political economy.

In a powerful interpretation of the meanings of “farang” and farangestān to the travelers, Vahdat offers the metaphor of shahr-e farang as an Iranian redesign of the European peep show: “farangestan—both when standing in dialectical opposition to the Iranian self and when projecting domestic ideals on foreign objects and spaces—is not an entirely new discovery but rather an embodiment of familiar myths and archetypes” (p. 52). Compelling and convincing, interpretations like this could benefit from more thorough engagement with existing scholarship (as Vahdat does notably well in many places in the text, such as with Mitchell’s work, noted above). In other parts of the text, particularly in the architecturally focused content of Chapter 4, some of the analyses could be made more persuasive with more evidence. The discussion of “the military logic behind the travelers’ fascination with architectural firmness” in conjunction with their “interest in Farangestan’s sociopolitical strength” is productively tied to a discussion on building material. Such discussions are provocative. They do, however, leave room for additional evidence and illustration.

But I hesitate to call these points out as limitations! There are many insights and threads for further research that Vahdat provides throughout the text. Instead, I think of these as enticements. For example, when he tells of the work that one of his travelers (Farrokh-Khan Amin al-Dowleh) did as an overseer of urban development in Tehran and minister of the interior after his travels to farang, I was eager to know more and to see examples. An analytical comparison of urban spaces in Tehran that reflected Farrokh-Khan’s European grand tour—or better, his Occidentalist interpretation of European urban spaces—would have given built testimony to the ideas explored in Vahdat’s narrative. Moments like this in the text compel me to look forward to Vahdat’s future work.

Indeed, students of the design of the built environment and historians of architecture and urbanism will benefit immensely from the descriptive, analytical, and interpretive contributions that Vahdat offers in Occidentalist Perspectives. The prose is clear, readable, and enjoyable. The descriptions are rich, offering material for further study. The analyses illuminate connections between the built environment and social change. And the interpretations are thought-provoking. Those fascinated with Iran’s history of modernization, transnationalism, and tajaddod will benefit from the grounding in archival and architectural evidence provided in Occidentalist Perspectives. And those studying nineteenth-century architecture and urbanism in Iran will find rich theoretical direction from Vahdat’s thoughtful analytic insights.