After 25 years
Part 5
July 28, 2004
iranian.com
Here and there in Tehran one can notice attempts by an architect
to draw inspiration from more traditional motifs and translate
them into harmonious reinterpretation, as in the friezes of geometric
brickwork that ornament some of the apartment buildings and luxurious
villas. But in the absence of urban planning to harmonize standards
and norms, these remain exceptions, the excuse being that brick
has become costly. Surely not more than the mirrored glass facades
which will soon collect dust, crack and break, leaving their occupiers
in the cold, but giving the builders another excuse to pull down
their carcasses and rebuild anew.
Not everyone, however, is critical
of what I find abhorrent. Some people actually equate the new vision
of Tehran with progress. The weekly sweeper who comes to do floors
in my mother's house is thrilled. 'Why don't
you
come back to live here now that Iran is abad?' I replied that to me, abadi (meaning literally 'irrigated place') never amounted to an asphalt
jungle, but to shaded gardens. He must have regarded me as a hopelessly retrograde
nostalgic who truly deserved to have been dispossessed.
He has his reasons to be happy, since he lives in the former
slums of Tehran, into which admittedly the best of construction
efforts have gone. Instead of the miserable hovels without basic
amenities (and I know what I say, since I had submitted some damning
reports on these slums with a plea for urgent action), they now
have row upon row of neat housing with patches of lawn and flowerbeds
in front. Abadi has thus come to the underprivilged quarters of
Tehran, though poverty has not disappeared from many remoter regions,
and wherever it has, it has come at a cost in environmental terms
that might eventually spell disaster as in the case of the Golestan
Forest.
For nothing is done according to plan and careful study.
If the Caspian coast looks good in terms of climate and landscape
for development, so be it, development there will be, whatever
the consquences. Nor is the razing of old houses and gardens
a thing of the past. There are those who still live under the threat
of being dispossessed and seeing their house and garden give
its
place to another highrise.
Such is the case with an island of
bliss in the middle of Tehran, with sepia photos, calligraphied
farmans
and other delightful reminders of the past, plastered on the
walls and to which, moreover, one is led through a garden with
trellised
arches drowned under well-tended flowering vines. It happens
to belong to the family of a famous chronicler of the constitutional
revolution of 1906, but is constantly threatened by the adjacent
Harasat (which, in case you do not know, means a place that
is full of Security men). The fear of dispossession is still so
present
that in some cases beautiful old houses are torn down by their
very owners and the land is sold off before the government
agents
appear.
Vandalism wrought by builders and much more inadmissibly by owners
has occasionally mobilized citizens and journalists to undertake
action and stop the demolition of what little authenticity and
charm have survived. My own house was bull-dozed so quickly that
I thought its old tiles were gone forever until, on a trip to Peshawar
in Pakistan, I happened to see two of them displayed in the Afghan
bazaar. (I knew they were mine, because of their size and the rare
portrait of a female, Taj-saltana, on one of the tiles).
Even UNESCO
has stepped in to prevent the razing of a Safavid caravanserai
in Isfahan, where builders intend to erect a shopping centre. The
international agency has threatened to remove that jewel of a city
from the World Heritage list, and thankfully, for now, progression
on the work has been arrested. In an article written last autumn
I mentioned that in the Meydan-e Arg in Tabriz, archeological work
had been stopped by the Minister of Housing who planned to erect
a large mosalla prayer hall to celebrate the memory of 'the
Imam'.
 I went to Tabriz and beheld the monster; its green-painted
skeleton of steel beams and gigantic air-conditioning ducts has
so taken over the square that whatever remains of the Arg -- still
impressive enough -- has been pushed back as though forgotten
by time. Even in a place like Tabriz, which has suffered from earthquakes,
this building will resist the blow of death it deserves. That privilege
is not given to everyone in Iran, as the recent disaster in Bam
sadly demonstrates.
In Tehran, there are so few reminders of the past, that most
of the young are not even aware of what is Persian, even less of
the potential of our architecture and its ability to serve as a
realistic model for innovation. For our architecture, both extant
and extinct, is a real treasure-house of ideas that can be adapted
to the needs of today. A team sent by the United Nations to assess
the damage incurred by old monuments as a result of Saddam's
bombing , were amazed at the wealth and beauty of the architecture,
even though pockmarked like Swiss cheese by the war. But the young,
who are dying to discover the authentic Persian, have little idea
of it.
 One of these who came to visit me was impressed by my mother's
living room as a paragon of Persian atmosphere, while, apart
from Qajar miniatures on the walls and some carpet bolsters lying
here
and there, it has fake English furnishings and a non-descript
style in its architecture. Nor are his generation much better acquainted
with the arts of the world. I gave some old books to a girl who
studies at the Faculty of Fine Arts and she screamed with delight
upon seeing reproductions of European masters whom she studies
without being allowed to see any illustrations of their work.
These
tattered old books, the source of an unspeakable joy, will no
doubt bring about a breakthrough in her artistic work.
Why is there such a discrepancy between that which experts are
doing for preserved monuments and that which is done by the mollarchy
or their entrepreneurs? Lack of education in the arts is partly
to blame for poor taste, and the degradation of taste is a reflection
of the values and standards of the bazaar whose occupants, one
would think, should have been inspired by the vaulted alleys within
which they dwelt. They have been building with official blessings
at a rapid pace but without consulting experts.
This bazaari class,
whose ideal is to make quick money without investment nor risk,
and who therefore resented the rapidly expanding industrial class
of the former era, are, together with those who occupy posts
without a minimal qualification, the main beneficiaries of the
revolution.
So you have the lethal combination of bazaar and former slum-dwellers
to set the esthetic and environmental standards for the future
of Iran. Haphazard building activity is motivated by greed much
more than by need.
And nowhere is bad taste and poor construction as visible as
in some of the newly-built mosques, erected by marginal elements
to flatter the centres of power and to prove their devotion to
God in the hope of obtaining a lucrative deal or the licence to
stir up mischief. These new mosques have been faced with badly-made
tiles in the drabbest colours like mud-brown, dark green and mustard
yellow, formerly reserved for cheap public baths or slaughterhouses,
and all this underneath a shiny tin dome. I did not even wish to
see the interiors. Anyway, for lack of devout visitors, they are
mostly empty.
Not even the greatest masterpieces are safe in the
hands of mollas. The glaring exception to the good preservation
of monuments are significantly the sacred complexes like Mashad
and Qom, which are directly under the superivision of the bonyad
foundations, those devouring dynosaurs that swallow up more than
half of the national budget without giving the slightest account.
So is it that the original beauty of many a splendid mosque is
ruined by the disgraceful taste of a mollarchy devoid of the wherewithal
to fully appreciate the proportions of graceful arches and the
delicacy of masterpieces in faience which are replaced by newer
ones bearing inscriptions in memory of dead ayatollahs.
 Inside
they are full of crude mirrorwork, and outside they are garlanded
with garish neon lin pinks and slime greens. In the days when devotion
really mattered, rulers employed the best architects and craftsmen
to build the masterpieces we know. No more today >>> Part
6 >>> index
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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