Architecture, Building and Planning - Research Publications
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ItemDesign of higher education learning spaces in Iran: from the Qajar period to the present time(Evaluating 21st Century Learning Environments(E21LE), 2014)By the mid-nineteenth century, art and architecture education in Iran had been based upon traditional apprenticeship. The architecture of the educational buildings in Iran has stylistically changed since the early 1850s, when the first European style technical college was established. Since then, not only have Westernism, nationalism, and modernism influenced the cultural and architectural taste of the Iranian society, but they also had an impact on that of the authorities, and consequently, on that of the university architects, who were commissioned by the westernising governments of the Qajars and the Pahlavis. This study explores the ways in which the traditional styles in designing higher education buildings in Iran have been transformed into modern and regionalist ones.
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ItemThe theoretical inapplicability of regionalism to analysing architectural aspects of Islamic shrines in Iran in the last two centuries(The Charity Organisation, 2013)Regionalism, as a counter process to internationalism through which modernism was criticised, could have been an encompassing system in analysing architectural works, if the main theorists of regionalism had not limited the scope of this theory to only modern and abstract way of designing and thinking in architecture. Some of them, like Curtis, criticises Islamic ways of cultural expression in symbolic and popular architectural designs while the other, like Frampton, only count a modern expression of regional identity in architecture as ‘critical regionalism’. The major architectural characteristics of Islamic shrines in the Qajar and more recent periods, has undergone significant changes. The main role of the domes of the shrines, for example, became symbolic rather than functional. This study examines the ways in which Western Orientalism, even in regionalist language, has failed to present a comprehensive image in analysing architectural works in developing countries, like Iran, in which internationalism did not change every aspect of architectural forms. Islamic shrines were of the places that their architectural elements persisted to change in confronting the Western cultural tsunami, which was accelerated in the last two hundred years. However, the main form of these shrines is not functional, as it was before, and this allows the interaction of Irano-Islamic and modern architecture to happen easily. The present study will discuss how theories and methodologies, which seem quite logical in analysing Western architecture during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, are not applicable to the study of the Islamic shrines in the same period in Iran.
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ItemTowards Morphogenesis in Architecture(SAGE PUBLICATIONS LTD, 2009-09)Procedural, parametric and generative computer-supported techniques in combination with mass customization and automated fabrication enable holistic manipulation in silico and the subsequent production of increasingly complex architectural arrangements. By automating parts of the design process, computers make it easier to develop designs through versioning and gradual adjustment. In recent architectural discourse, these approaches to designing have been described as morphogenesis. This paper invites further reflection on the possible meanings of this imported concept in the field of architectural designing. It contributes by comparing computational modelling of morphogenesis in plant science with techniques in architectural designing. Deriving examples from case-studies, the paper suggests potentials for collaboration and opportunities for bi-directional knowledge transfers.