After 25 years
Part 3
July 20, 2004
iranian.com
No matter how much one has heard about the current explosion of
kitsch, the reality shocks, all the more so that this was a land
once plentifully blessed with infallible taste in artistic production.
It is true that the change in the present landscape had begun earlier,
but it has reached unbearable proportions by now. The lack of norms
or the lack of observance of existing norms are also proving to
be a great strain on rare resources. There were warnings, of course,
but who gave a damn when money was hanging from trees that were
felled so that more could gush forth from mushrooming towers of
concrete and glass?
The high-rise monsters in undefined styles,
without any sense of harmony or proportion or architectural sense,
and unrelieved by a tree, are at least thrice damned: as eyesores,
as a strain on water resources, as annihilators of trees and green
space, but very much a boon to the pockets of ignorant self-made
builders in league with the bazaar and the top hierarchy. Built
by profiteers with the philosophy 'Build and God will provide',
many recent constructions are destined to become slums, more difficult
to raze than the makeshift concoctions of yesteryear's slums.
A European resident referred with sarcastic euphemism (an oxymoron?)
to the mushrooming fantasies as 'the fruit of the creative
imagination of Iranians let loose'. For not only is there
no urban logic in many of today's constructions, but the buildings
have drawn superficially on every conceivable theme, with pseudo-post-modern
and mirrored glass often incongruously blended with little understood
neo-Classical themes like cornices, columns and balustrades, often
turned upside down -- a trend that had already begun way back
in the 1960s.
I have never seen such a concentration of kitsch
and vulgarity, not even in China at the turn of the last millennium,
when everything old was being pulled down in favour of facades
covered entirely with white bathroom tiles, and garlanded, as in
Iran, with garish neon. The mushrooming of highrises and the ornateness
of motifs blindly drawn from a widespread repertory express the
frustrated dreams of the many, for whom, I venture to guess, vulgarity
might be a substitute for the lack of colour in clothes and the
want of fun and freedom.
There are fantasies galore. In Tabriz,
where a modern five-star hotel, complete with a façade of
blue mirror-glass and a glass elevator to hoist you to the top
(with a high-cholesterol sarshir breakfast to die for -- and die
of), sprouts from a hill, it overshadows a villa constructed at
the
base in the style of a Greek temple whose marble reliefs have been
copied impeccably well, but in stucco version. Not far from it,
the delightful octagonal pavilion of Shahgoli in the middle of
a lake was torn down and rebuilt without any charm, while all around
it a park full of concrete and steel and all too visible lamps
is being laid out.
On the Caspian coast villas are mushrooming at an incredibly
rapid pace, all the way up to the heights of Kelardasht [See: not
too shabby], in a bid to
transform the coastline into a touristic haven, all this at the
expense of the lush forests which were home to a rich variety
of plant species and animal life, and in the clearings, to rice
paddies
citrus and tea plantations (some of these cultures have now been
transferred to other regions). Had the plunderers of the land
bee satisfied with occupying the confiscated gardens and villas
of
Tehran, the self-made builders would have missed the opportunity
to cash in on money poured into the myserious bonyad coffers.
 When the revolution occurred, the property of the possessed was
considered
legitimate booty and a recipe for overnight wealth, notwithstanding
the simple calculation that the possessions of a few thousand
could not enrich forty million people overnight. The rabble were
let
loose on the natural resources of an arid country. Flora and
fauna were legitimate prey, even in national parks where the
last of
rare species had been protected with love. Later, they began
to cut off the trees of the Golestan Forest National Park in
Gorgan to erect villages on the site, but nature took revenge by
unleashing
flash floods. With no tree trunks to contain the flow of water,
the houses were uprooted and carried away. Instead of the natural
flora and fauna of the country, there are now a plethora of
stucco and plastic versions.
And nothing is as absurd as the sickly palm trees in light green
plastic with twinkling fairy lights, often placed as an afterthought
to one side of a square without apparent rhyme or reason. Are these
artificial trees the result of a literal reading of the Koran's
verses in praise of the palm? Or is this the poor man's imitation
of Dubai's lavish bad taste? Or was there something else?
Sure enough, upon my return to Europe, an Egyptian friend confirmed
that the same epidemic had occurred in Cairo, but people had complained
and the plastic palms were removed. It turned out that someone
from the emirates had been making big money by selling each of
the trees (probably produced on the cheap in China) for eleven
thousand dollars apiece.
 Our
ideals had been the cypress and the plane, so often celebrated
in verse and in prose. In Iran the palm
tree grew only in the south, the plateau was famous for other species
-- planes and poplars, willows and oaks, cypresses and elms, acacias
and
the hardy aridity-resistant tree called ar ar. The plane
trees of Tehran were so impressive that they were written about
by the
Italian traveller, Pietro della Valle, four centuries ago >>> Part
4
Author
Fatema Soudavar Farmanfarmaian was born in Tehran in 1940 and
studied in Iran and Switzerland. In Iran she was on the committe
of a number of organizations, including the Museum of Modern Art
and the Women's University. She also did volunteer work for the
Deparment of the Environment, where she planned education for schools
and TV on environmental subjects. Since the Revolution she has been
focusing on research and writing. Her latest appeared in The
Journal of the Society for Iranian Studies (Summer/Fall 2000)
called "Haft Qalam Arayish: Cosmetics int he Iranian World".
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