Picturing Iranian Modernity: A Modernist Architecture Journal of the Pahlavi Dynasty
Author(s)
Jorshari, Houman Riazi
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Abstract
Following the modernization process in Iran started by Reza Shah (1925–1941), Mohammad Reza Shah (1941–1979), his reformist son, began institutionalizing professions and establishing associations, including the Association of Iranian Graduate Architects (AIGA) in 1945 and the Association of Iranian Architects (AIA) circa 1968. The desire for mass communication and administrative organization on a national level led each association to publish its architectural journal. Considering this historical background and looking at the reciprocal relationship between the colonizer and the colonized, this paper takes up the notion of reciprocal gaze in colonial studies to better understand the role of modernity in the architectural context of Iran during the reign of Mohammad Reza Shah. Starting with problematizing the notion of the World Picture and taking distance from Edward Said’s East-West binary, this paper focuses instead on the heterogeneity of the spectrum between these binary models rather than the oversimplified and generalized categorization of the colonizer as the dominant and the colonized as the passive subject. In this way, the in-betweenness acknowledges the complexities of power dynamics and makes it possible to think about other forms of power. Following this line of thought, this paper invites a close reading of the only all-English issue of the architecture journal Honar va Me’māri, published in 1973, to demonstrate the double concern of Iranian architects about seeing and being seen on the international stage. More than just a publication, Honar va Me’māri, a journal established by young architects, became the site for exploring the space between tradition and modernity, old and new, and the state’s ideology of making a new nation and their own avant-garde practice.
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Date
2025-03
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Text
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Proceedings
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