Abstract
Under the USA’s free-market foreign policy in the 1960s and 1970s, the Tehran Redevelopment Company (TRC) in collaboration with a New York firm, Starrett Housing Corporation, undertook one of the most extensive and innovative Middle Eastern public housing projects. * As part of Tehran’s masterplan designed by the Austrian-American urban planner Victor Gruen – aided by Iranian architect Abdolaziz Farmanfarmaian – the scheme accommodated 15,500 low- and middle-income families, especially those of civil servants, in an area that became known as Shahrak-e Ekbatan (Ekbatan). On one hand, the development aimed to change the everyday life of middle-class people; on the other, it sought to institute a capitalist economy with a bias towards rapid industrialisation. To achieve these objectives, the TRC asked Gruzen and Partners (USA) and Space Group (South Korea) to create a prototypical model: they selected the strongly collective urban form of a Brutalist concrete megastructure. Noting the influence of US President Jack Kennedy’s doctrine for developing countries during the Cold War, this article reveals how the Ektaban scheme addressed local culture and society, while also accommodating change over time. As a Middle Eastern Modernist megastructure, it was erected after Reyner Banham in 1973 had declared that typology ‘dead’ in the Western world.
Highlights
While modernisation in Iran can be seen as starting from the mid-1850s, it gained a real momentum in the aftermath of the Second World War
As the Cold War began to intensify in the early-1960s, the Kennedy administration opted for a foreign policy to defeat Communist aggression in so-called ‘emerging nations’ [2]
The idea of developing Tehran as a megacity, composed of megastructures, was introduced to Iran by one of the movement’s pioneers, Victor Gruen, who was commissioned by the Planning and Finance Organisation to prepare Tehran’s masterplan
Summary
While modernisation in Iran can be seen as starting from the mid-1850s, it gained a real momentum in the aftermath of the Second World War. Gruen’s design offered a futuristic urban imagery for the capital city, with an agglomeration of satellite towns and megastructures to form a new backbone for Tehran. The idea of developing Tehran as a megacity, composed of megastructures, was introduced to Iran by one of the movement’s pioneers, Victor Gruen, who was commissioned by the Planning and Finance Organisation to prepare Tehran’s masterplan.
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