THE STORY OF "ONE-STORY-NESS."

Abstract

This article focuses on the old houses of Tabriz, northwest of Iran, and studies their structural transformation during the Qajar and early Pahlavi period (18th and early 20th centuries). Here, these dwellings are studied as some already written texts with hidden narratives concealed in the lines of the buildings in order to reveal their syntactic as well as semantic implications. In this regard, ideas of some leading thinkers—such as Heidegger, Bachelard, Bollnow, Norberg-Schulz and Pallasmaa—about home and non-physical, spiritual, and existential aspects of dwelling will be reviewed to show how a house narrates us about its multidimensionality. Then, considering the traditional houses of Tabriz it will be shown that how the structure of the houses and consequently their existential and ontological implications have been transformed into a kind of “typelessness” and thus narrate the storey of contemporary “one-storey-ness.”