Iranian architects have radically transformed their profession in the past decade. Despite stark isolation following the 1979 revolution, today architecture practice in Iran is becoming transnationalized with growing attention from the international design community. Institutional actors such as educators, magazine editors and organizers of design workshops in Iran have leveraged the movements of people across Iran’s borders to enact this transformation; the results of which are either praised as launching a new age in Iranian architecture practice or lamented as a new era of colonization reinforced by dependence on foreign institutional structures.
To understand this transformation, I investigate the role of migrant architects in shaping the profession by drawing from literature in migration studies, economic geography, and the globalization of architecture. My method builds on in-depth interviews with transnational migrants and on primary sources such as magazines, weblogs, and individuals’ and firms’ resumes. I present my findings as a sequence of five movements: The first movement is the Iranian architects’ gaze abroad. In the context of post-revolutionary Iran, this gaze was not trivial. Broadcast media was tightly controlled by the state and what foreign media that made its way into Iran was often censored. The second movement is the travel or emigration of architects from Iran, primarily to cities in North America and Europe. This movement became easier as Iran’s isolationist foreign policies thawed in the late 1990s. The third movement is a return migration to Iran. The motivations for return were described variously as a sense of duty or the opportunity for professional advancement in Iran with foreign experience on a resume. The fourth movement is the gaze of foreign architects to Iran. I use foreign magazine issues on Iran and look at the networks of Iranian and non-Iranian individuals that collectively draw that gaze. The fifth movement is the travel of foreign architects to Iran, a growing number of who lead design workshops for Iranian architects or attempt to enter Iran’s lucrative building industry. Significant in these movements is the range of formal and informal practices that architects engage, which collectively drive the transnational transformation of the architecture profession that is not told in studies of the globalization of architecture.
