Design of higher education learning spaces in Iran: from the Qajar period to the present time

Abstract

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.