The Stage of Dissemination: The Transformation of Architectural Concepts in Iranian Architectural Journals (1941–1967)

Abstract

From 1941 to 1967, modern architecture in Iran shifted from a phenomenon confined to the upper class with a focus on urban monuments and government buildings to a public commodity. Three of the period’s architectural journals, Arshitikt (Architect), Bank-i Sakhtimani (Construction Bank), and Mi‘mari-yi Nuvin (New Architecture), were among the most effective tools for spreading notions of modern architecture in Iran at this time. This article traces mid-twentieth-century Iranian architects’ conceptual constellation of modern architecture through a quantitative and qualitative analysis of these periodicals. We argue that the transformation of core architectural concepts in each journal were due to changes in the sociopolitical context and in Iranian architects’ professional status as models of modern architecture were increasingly disseminated. In particular, our article demonstrates how the idea of architecture as fan (technique) in the journal Arshitikt (1946–48) was defined as the exclusive expertise of modern Iranian architects. Fan was replaced by the notion of architecture as construction in Bank-i Sakhtimani (1955–62) to justify the ongoing engineered mass production of modernized houses. By the 1960s, journals like Mi‘mari-yi Nuvin (1961–65) situated architecture as an art and a science, reflecting newly emerging views on national modernist architecture in a stabilizing professional condition.