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The idea of the ideal is no stranger in Iran. Indeed Iranian culture seems in various ways drawn toward the prospect of perfection. The wider world, in which most of us live, owes to this complex and sometimes turbulent world the concept of paradise; or at least that word’s etymology in pairi.daêza-, according to Wikipedia a “walled (enclosure)”, from pairi- “around” + -diz “to create, make”. And many great works of Persian art, film, poetry or design appear, at least to this outsider, to be highly focused, ruthlessly edited compositions…in fact, entire constructed worlds in and off themselves. The villas built recently by the young Iranian architect Pouya Khazaeli Parsa are striking as stark concentrations of plastic ambition. First the Darvish Residence-a habitable staircase ascending to the sky-and now the Shahbazi Residence-a white cubic villa balanced on four flattened pilotis-arrest our attention by their blunt synthesis of structure, skin and sequence of inventive space. These villas are cosmopolitan yet also somehow impressively direct. They communicate architecture’s legacy of the Ideal Villa in language that evokes many raw, even Utopian modernist experiments. The Darvish Residence loops around on itself to form a three-dimensional serpentine route rising about an ornamental square pond. This pool not only cools the air; it and the void above function as the symbolic center of the home, a geometric and axial sign that also mirrors the sky. The language of this first house by Pouya Khazaeli-the undecorated structure; the white, black and reddish palette; the flat and stepped roof terraces-recalls the Purist work of Le Corbusier, inspired by that master’s “Voyage d’Orient” a century ago, and projects by such distinct and different Early Modernist architects as Melnikov, Terragni and O’Gorman. If the Darvish Residence entices the visitor to explore a rewarding architectural promenade, leading from the street up through the bowels of the house to a...
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Contemporary Iranian Architecture: Paradox & Continuity
The past 40 years have witnessed radical changes in Iran, veering from the all-out modernizing zeal of the late Shah to the theocratic regime of the...
Office dA - Nader Tehrani in USA
Office dA
Time and again over the course of the 20th century, architects embarked on that most bizarre of research exercises: the attempt to identify scientific...
Ravensbourne College
Foreign Office Architects
Located on the Greenwich peninsula, a finger of land jutting out into a bend in the river Thames, Ravensbourne City College is part of an urban develo...
