Reading Contemporary Architecture of Tehran through Residential Houses of the 1330s–1350s

Abstract

This study aims to explain the transformations of form, space, and the architectural design process in Tehran’s contemporary residential architecture during the 1330s–1350s. A qualitative case-study approach was employed using an interpretive–analytical method to examine nine representative residential houses from Tehran across the three decades; data were collected through architectural documents, drawings, visual materials, and comparative analysis. The findings indicate a clear temporal shift in architectural paradigms from early modernism to high modernism and subsequently to modern regionalism. Inferential analysis reveals significant transformations in form and spatial organization, an increasing tendency toward commercialization of housing, weakening of traditional identity-based criteria, and a shift from elite-oriented to mass-oriented architectural production. External socio-political drivers and internal belief systems increasingly influenced residential form-making, while space functioned progressively as a socio-political instrument. Residential architecture in Tehran between the 1330s and 1350s experienced a gradual transition from modernist innovation to modernity and one-sided modernization, accompanied by identity crisi, changing dominant discourses, and fundamental alterations in design thinking, all of which are reflected in the formal, spatial, and constructional characteristics of housing.