IRAN – before and after the revolution

Establishing a dialogue between the Iranian urban landscape, which emerged after the Islamic revolution of 1979 and is largely characterised by the influence of Western architecture, and the historical sites and cultural sites of ancient Persia is the central interest of this paper. Are there possibilities to find connections between past and present in the current debate on culture and architecture in Iranian society today?

From this point of view, it also seems essential to refer to the ambiguity of the emergence of urban landscapes, i.e. the impact between Eastern and Western cultural conceptions (intentions and consequences) and the imposition of the latter with the consequent gradual abandonment of one’s own cultural and architectural history and tradition. It also raises the question of how it can happen that a country, despite the changes it has undergone as a result of historical events and influences from different cultural epochs, has been able to develop different architectural languages and consider them a cultural heritage, today in the contemporary cultural debate it struggles to draw on this wealth. In this tense relationship between the history of one’s own culture, Islamic doctrine and influences from the West, which are considered politically undesirable, the imposition of the Western image arises particularly in the suburbs of urban landscapes.

The work oscillates between the beautiful appearance of a so-called reality and the reality of the image, it aims at an unravelling of media representation as well as favouring and clarifying perception while also taking the collective dimension into account.

It refers to social processes, shows unstable systems in open and closed spaces, thus referring to social and political situations.