دانلود کتاب Degrees of Peripherality: The Rhetoric of Architecture in Late Twentieth-Century Iran

This chapter reflects back on aspects of architectural production in Iran before and after the Islamic Revolution of 1979, as a vehicle for exploring peripherality in architecture. Iran is an interesting case as it has a long and tumultuous history of engagement with development and the West. Drawing on existing scholarship in architectural history, we identify traces of a quest for appropriate cultural expressions in the architecture of and for the country. While such a quest received official support, it was also an individual pursuit, wherein some architects attempted to pull together divergent expressions and local traditional cosmologies or interpretations thereof. A spectrum of approaches ensued, some of which persisted for decades. Some of these approaches have been misunderstood as forms of cultural resistance and have been misconstrued in terms of critical regionalism which, as we note, is a close interpretation of peripherality in architecture. Recognizing these as misinterpretations is important since, if peripherality implies agency and critical reflection, some of these responses from the margins—in this case Iran—lack the dialogical characteristics underpinning peripherality. Here, attention is directed to distinguishing between peripherality and resistance, two overlapping concepts that have often collapsed into one another in architecture.