Building Iran: Modernism, Architecture & National Heritage
About This Volume
This is a guide to a juncture in Iranian history when foundational issues of national purpose and cultural heritage – secular reform and religious tradition – were being reframed. Architecture of the Pahlavi reign, 1925-79, is the principal subject of discussion, along with the Society for National Heritage, which commissioned numerous buildings and monuments, initiated over sixty preservation projects, and founded the nation’s first archeological museum and its first national library. The broad scope of analysis sheds new light on how and why Iran’s cultural heritage was reinvented and used as a corridor to a progressive and at times utopian modernity; as an ideology for political reforms; and as a platform for claims to a leadership role in international politics.
Revolution and tradition are two sides of the same coin in Talinn Grigor’s book on Iranian architecture. It starts in 1925 after Reza Pahlavi seized control of the country, but it arcs back to Ancient and Medieval Persia. Not that the government was rejecting modernity. It instead promoted a reconstruction of the past that would aid efforts to make modern Iran an independent nation with an irrefutable claim to existence and power. Prodigious archival research informs Grigor’s account of the excavations and discoveries Iranian authorities used to construct monuments to national heroes like Omar Khayyam, an important mathematician and astronomer of the 11th century as well as the author of the ‘Rubauyat’. Grigor also brings immense knowledge to her lively discussions of the modern idiom integrated into such retrospective monuments and buildings. Illustrated, this book introduces architecture and historical sources that are all but unknown outside specialist circles. It is the first in English to study twentieth-century Iranian architecture within the historical contexts that shaped its from and significance. The corpus of photographs will help the many readers unfamiliar with the architectural riches of Iran. Current turbulence and misunderstanding with the Middle East highlight the importance of Grigor’s book.