Focusing on the design of large-scale housing schemes, this doctoral dissertation examines the extent to which the architecture of dwelling was affected by the oil-led geopolitics of the Cold War, and influenced by the modernist logic of architectural design and urban planning in Iran’s period of high-modernisation (1945-1979), as Eskandar Mokhtari termed it. This study questions the influence of the country’s geopolitical position during the Cold War, and its impact on the architecture of dwelling. It shows how a series of experimental housing solutions, initiated by leading Iranian architects mostly educated in the West (Europe and North America) became a physical expression of both the state’s modernisation demands and people’s everyday needs. Finally, it illustrates how the design mechanisms employed by these architects enabled for a continual and constant change and transformation in their proposed housing schemes, and empowered the users of space to designate and establish a set of relations with their living environment. While this study could be seen as a contribution to the discourse of urban modernisation in Iran, mainly by focusing on the agency of the dweller in the transformation through time of public housing districts in the country, it also aims to address some current issues related to the design and production of public housing. It seems that in the process of housing development, architects and decision-makers with different backgrounds employ two distinct approaches that mostly cannot be resulted in a convergent solution. While this gap between visions and realities of public housing policies and designs might be seen as a universal as well as a common phenomenon, this issue resulted in many critiques on the development of public housing and built environments, in Iran. Iranian architects criticised the government for its top-down housing policies overemphasising the application of industrialised methods for the production of houses, but neglect the importance of people’s socio-cultural practices as well as vernacular patterns of inhabitation for housing design. On the contrary, decision-makers describe housing solutions provided by architects mostly as visionary and inefficient. Accordingly, investigating overlaps between these divergent approaches is of vital importance, as it would foster and promote a dialogue among multiple stakeholders involved in the process of housing development, and illustrate the roles that architects can perform therein. In Iran’s period of high-modernisation, the architecture of dwelling was widely seen as a place to fulfil the state’s ambitious goals of modernisation projects, and simultaneously to resist universalising tendencies. The Iranian Finance and Planning Organisation prepared five distinct Development Plans, where housing for middle and low-income families held a prominent place. Indeed, these Plans projected the national and international socio-political and economic condition of the time that resulted from rural-urban migrations and the demographic changes being seen in Iran. Accordingly, each Plan led to the construction of a series of large-scale housing projects in urban areas. Among these projects, Kuy-e Chaharsad-Dastgah (1946-50), Kuy-e Narmak (1951-58), Kuy-e Kan (1958-64), Kuy-e Ecbatana (1972-92), and Shushtar-Nou (1975-85) were designed and developed as experimental models by leading Iranian architects, to promote and foster a synthesis of Western living standards and Iran’s vernacular patterns of inhabitation. By investigating these models initiated in three different stages of modernisation in Iran, this dissertation, first, unfolds the processes that created/led to collaboration and negotiation among visions and realities of stakeholders (particularly architects and policy/decision-makers) involved in the production of houses and provision of housing solutions. Then, it shows how the mechanisms employed for the design of these housing schemes enabled for a continual and constant change and transformation. Finally, this study argues that each of these housing models is embedded with a form of inhabitable voids that could be seen and read as heterotopia, as Michel Foucault defined. In other words, incorporating some local archetypes into the design process of these projects implies and creates a certain type of place that the ‘other’ space would flourish. Accordingly, these heterotopic voids might include a creative potential/characteristic to be perceived as an omnipresent tool from the disciplinary toolbox of architecture that would cater for providing certain forms of relationships among people and with their living environment.@en

A perusal of the literature on housing debates reveals that the term ‘value’ is mostly applied to express the financial value of a house and is dealt with in economic literature. However, an alternative meaning of the word ‘value’ in the housing literature can be found in research into the values underlying housing preferences, applying research methods from the marketing literature. The explicit combination of moral values and housing policy and design is found neither in the academic housing nor in the philosophical literature. However, diving deeper into the housing debate reveals that there are a host of moral values already present throughout this debate that are often not explicitly articulated and explicated, such as inclusiveness, sustainability, autonomy, and security. The aim of this paper is to address the role of values in housing policy and design. By doing so, we apply the Design for Values approach (DfV). We argue that the DfV approach can help to make implicit moral values more explicit, which can improve the housing debate, housing policy-making, and housing design. The paper first explores which values are relevant for housing policy and design and operationalizes those values. Next, the paper describes key debates in housing such as: What is “adequate housing” in times of rapid urbanization and increasing house prices? We argue that by exploring the underlying values of these debates, stakeholders can create a better understanding of the current (lack of) fundamental discussions on housing issues.@en

The need for sustainable built environment is pressing; an urgency that spans environmental, economic and social values of sustainability. Since late 1980s, the Lean philosophy has been adopted in the construction sector, with a focus on efficiency, predominantly as a function of economic competence. More recently, however, the Lean principles and practices have been revisited and increasingly used to create and preserve social and environmental values as well. The result was a growing, but dispersed, body of knowledge on sustainability and Lean construction, and hence, equivocal about how Lean contributes to sustainability. By means of a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) based on 118 journal articles from 1998 to 2017, this article aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of “how Lean helps achieve and maintain sustainability in construction sector”. The findings are structured into a holistic framework, which underlines a multidimensional approach toward sustainability, i.e., focus on stakeholders, across various construction phases, while simultaneously being heedful of concerns regarding people, planet, and profit. It became clear that the current body of knowledge is mainly skewed toward economic values, which calls for more research in the social and environmental aspects of construction. This study assembles a palette of existing best practices, based on which scholars’ and practitioners’ can balance their efforts across three dimensions of sustainability. Moreover, it identifies several under-researched areas of Lean sustainable construction that have the potential to be expanded in by future researchers.

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Oil revenues in the late 1960s enabled the Iranian government to fund several international architecture congresses. Throughout the 1970s, a group of young Iranian architects organized a series of architectural events, among them the second Iran International Congress of Architects (IICA), held in Persepolis-Shiraz in 1974. This Congress resulted in the 'Habitat Bill of Rights', a CIAM-like charter submitted by the Iranian government to the first UN-conference on 'Human Settlements' in 1976. This article reveals the 1974 IICA's instrumental role in shaping the discourse on architectural regionalism in the design for dwelling and human habitats, approaches to the relationship between tradition and modernity, and importantly how the architecture of Kamran Diba aimed to bridge the gap between local culture and internationalism, by forming a novel synthesis of these two approaches. To illustrate the latter, this article examines the design and development of Shushtar-Nou, a new community model designed by Diba in southwest Iran. Implicit within its design is Diba's view on the Congress debates and his goal in developing a malleable environment that accommodated growth and change over time, while preserving its core attributes.@en

This article examines the growth and change through time of Kuy-e Narmak, a housing neighbourhood developed in the 1950s under the auspices of Mosaddeq’s Modernization Program. The project was designed by a group of young-leading European-educated Iranian architects that collaborated with the government to develop affordable housing solutions in Iran. To design this project, these architects advanced solutions that explored a cross-pollination between the principles of the functional city, and references from vernacular architecture. Over the last 6 decades, the number of households living in Narmak increased dramatically, from the initial goal of accommodating 7500 families, to the 90,000 families that currently live there. This article discusses the extent to which the initial design decisions were instrumental to cope with this extraordinary increase in the district’s density. We have used typological and morphological analysis, combined with site surveys and interviews to investigate the district’s growth and change through time. This article argues that the designer’s critical combination of modernist planning concepts with elements borrowed from Iran’s vernacular tradition resulted in a socially inclusive urban community. The plan’s rigid urban form has become instrumental in defining a neutral background to accommodate the ever-changing social and spatial practices of its inhabitants.@en

The concept of the Global Petroleumspace is an analytical tool which engages the roles which different oil actors play in the development of new urban ideas and built forms. Coined by Hein, this concept contributes to enriching our understanding of globalization, modernity, and architectural history and their impacts on space through time. Petroleum is modern industry’s fuel par excellence. For much of the world, it is the arrival of petroleum on the local scene that introduces modernity with its attendant spaces, forms, materials, and discourses. To frame this new discourse on urban development and petromodernity, three events were organized: ‘Petroleumscape Roundtable’ held as part of the 17th IPHS Conference at TU Delft, ‘Petroleum Modernism Symposium’, organized at the Illinois Institute of Technology, and ‘The Global Petroleumscape Conference’ held at the Faculty of Architecture at TU Delft. This article briefly recounts and reflects upon the scholarly discussions which took place at these events, in order to outline an emergent discourse on petroleum’s imbrication in architecture and planning.@en

Book Review: Kuwait Transformed: A History of Oil and Urban Life, Farah Al-Nakib (2016) Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 278 pp., 20 b&w illus., ISBN: 9780804796392, $24.95 (hardback)@en

Various constellations of oil actors—including corporations and nations—have shaped seemingly disconnected and geographically distant landscapes, cities, and buildings around the world over the last 150 years. Corporate, public, and popular media have publicized these cycles of spatializing oil. Together, construction and representation have created what is here collectively identified as a global palimpsestic petroleumscape. Based on archival research and a flourishing literature of secondary sources, this article applies the concept of the petroleumscape to two case studies in Iran and identifies two patterns of spatializing oil. First, in the southern region of Khuzestan, it tracks Iran’s modern transformation under the influence of British Petroleum (BP) (1901–1951), when oil and governmental interests built a complete support landscape. Then, in the capital Tehran, it investigates how US players helped shape the petroleumscape between 1953 and 1979, in line with US styles of consumption, car use, and urban development.@en

Similar to many Middle-Eastern countries during the 20th century, Iran underwent a unique process of modernisation. This process was accelerated in Tehran after the second World War, when the urban population density dramatically grew, due to rural-urban migration, and the construction of mass housing got a prominent place in the development agenda of the Iranian government. Accordingly, the government established a new financial organisation named Bank-e Sakhtemani (Construction Bank) to fund new urban projects, and the parliament adopted a new law by which the arid lands beyond the border of cities were declared as state properties. Doing so braced the role of Bank-e Sakhtemani in land-use strategies, and as a result, a series of new neighbourhoods was constructed in Tehran. Among these neighbourhoods, Narmak played a crucial role in forming modern Tehran’s Identity, and the project created a strong collective identity among its residents. Situated in the North-Eastern part of Tehran, Narmak was constructed on an area of 507 hectares, from which around 200 hectares was allocated to the public and collective amenities. This project aimed at accommodating 25,000 residents; however, it houses approximately 340,000 inhabitants, at present. To understand this adaptability, the spatial organisation of Narmak and its development should be studied. The urban layout of Narmak proposed a series of public outdoor spaces including a grid of linear gardens (Chaharbagh), and 110 enclosed gardens (Meydan) allocated to each respective block. In the block layout, houses were located around the edges of Meydans, and the repetition of this pattern provided the urban structure of Narmak. In this structure, Chaharbaghs and Meydans have become the permanent constituting a frame around which change could take place. Although these public spaces have remained unchanged, based on new needs, the inhabitants have had the possibilities to transfer their low-rise houses to mid-rise apartments, and adapt their private spaces. Therefore, by analysing Narmak’s urban form and development, this paper reveals typological elements, socio-cultural characteristics, and economic features that led to the survival and resilience of this modern urban form over times. @en

While in the Western world, at the time of the oil crisis in 1973, the megastructure movement was declared ‘dead’ by Reyner Banham, in Iran, the flow of oil income gave a new impulse to the movement. During the 1970s, Iran became the second largest oil exporter in the world, and the high rate of the petro-dollar made high-speed urbanisation possible. To respond to the rapid growth of the urban population density, the Iranian Housing Organisation financed the construction of high-rise residential buildings, and supported transnational collaborations for designing innovative housing projects. Subsequently, Iranian architects together with their international counterparts realised a series of prototypical housing models among which Kuy-e Ekbatan played a distinctive role in the development of urban housing in Tehran. Tehran’s master plan was designed by Victor Gruen as an agglomeration of satellite districts with commercial centres interconnected through a series of motorways. For developing each neighbourhood and giving more space to private cars and commercial amenities, architects and urban designers mostly chose to design a relatively small number of high-rise residential buildings around a shopping centre. However, the Iranian architect, Rahman Golzar who was the director of Tehran Renovation Joint Stock Firm, in collaboration with a New York based architecture firm, ‘Gruzen Partnership’, and the Korean avant-garde architect Kim Swoo Geun developed a collective urban form and a self-contained residential area that led to the formation of a new way of living and a strong collective identity among the residents of Ekbatan. Therefore, by analysing Ekbatan’s urban form and development, this paper reveals how this prototypical model addressed the local culture and society, how the imported models were adapted to local circumstances, and how this transnational collaboration resulted in creating a new collective community and life style. Understanding the development of this model might demonstrates how the Iranian oil industry contributed to alter the megastructure movement.@en

Before the 20th century, in Iran, the concept of the Persian Garden symbolized a well-ordered landscape, considered as the source of inspiration for urban planning, urban design, and architectural practices. More than a space for leisure or agriculture, it was the only spatial configuration in which any form of life was possible. This ideals was changed when Iran underwent a process of modernisation, especially during the 1970s, when the sudden increase in oil revenues made high-speed urbanisation and modernisation possible. Accordingly, the Iranian government committed large-scale investment to the development of mass housing, by which modern neighbourhoods would be constructed. Furthermore, the government used this strategy to respond to the growing urban population. As a result, almost regardless of the Iranian culture and climate conditions, high-rise residential buildings became the dominant type of urban housing, and the new built forms were mainly designed and constructed based on the modernist principles known as the ‘International Style’. Among those new neighbourhoods, Shushtar-e Nou represents a distinct, peculiar and alternative urban form, trying to respond to the place-specific aspects of the context. By analysing Shushtar-e Nou urban form and development, this paper reveals typological elements, socio-cultural characteristics and environmental thoughts that integrated Shushtar-e Nou with the idea of the Persian Garden, local culture and climate conditions. Understanding the development of this model demonstrates how the Persian Garden can still be a source of inspiration for urban-environmental planning, urban-ecological design, and local-architectural practices.@en

Under the American influence between the min 1950s and 1960s, the Iranian government in collaboration with local architects developed one of the most extensive and novel worker-housing programs in the Middle East. As a part of Iranian ‘Second Development Plan’ (1955-62), this program was designed to re-organise traditional family structures for the working class. On the one hand, the plan aimed at changing the every-day life of people and domestic space, re-educating women, and upgrading their roles in the society. On the other hand, the program intended to repulse the spreading Soviet influences in that region. To achieve these objectives, the Iranian Plan Organisation and Bank-e Sakhtemani (Construction Bank) developed a manual of cooperative housing typologies, forming an important instance of transnational planning during the 1960s. This manual outlined regulations for the construction of mass housing, based on the five main climate zones in Iran and on the number of bedrooms in each unit. It also described the spatial codes and regulations that a private firm or an individual would have to follow to get construction permission. Although the manual was so prescriptive that it left limited design scope to practices described by the government, Iranian architects realised a series of worker-housing projects in Tehran, among which Kuy-e Kan played a distinctive role. Building upon a brief analysis of Western influences such as the President Truman’s ‘Point Four Program’ and the Kennedy doctrine for developing countries, this paper reveals how this prototypical model addressed the local culture and society. Accordingly, this project poses questions about how imported models in a non-western country such as Iran related to matters of continuity with local traditions of space, meaning character and identity of place in worker-housing practices.@en