As is often the case while perusing the news on Twitter/X, it’s easy to end up down the rabbit hole on a particular topic, and so it happened to me recently with Iranian architecture. Philip Oldfield is the Head of School of Built Environment at UNSW Sydney and Professor of Architecture and has a bit of an obsession with Iranian brickwork. His account features a heavy dose of it, and with photos like these, it’s understandable why.
Woof Shadow Building in Tehran by Tachra Design.
Like so much of Iran’s recent history, the brickwork is tied up in the country’s relationship with the West—the story of partial colonialism, questions of modernity, and of course, sanctions. It’s entirely possible that if not for the persistent economic warfare led by the US, that architecture like that featured in the image above (and many more below) would not be being built in Iran today, but Western sanctions helped spur a rethink—or what Iranian architecture philosopher Razieh Ghorbani Kharaji calls “creative destruction.”
Sanctions Force a Rethink
For a long period, Iranian architecture largely mimicked modern Western and classical styles while turning away from Persian inspirations.
The past two decades of Western sanctions, however, have been a totalizing event, targeting aspects of everyday life. That includes In 2019 the US sanctioned the sale, supply, or transfer to or from Iran of raw and semi-finished metals, graphite, coal, and software for integrating industrial purposes will be sanctionable if those materials are to be used in connection with the Iranian construction sector.
Perhaps it’s no coincidence then that Iranian architects began embracing local materials in contemporary ways. As Oldfield says:
I was struck by how Iranian architects are taking local materials such as brick and tile and reinterpreting their use through advanced software tools and technologies, resulting in complex forms and geometries with curving, folding and even twisting brickwork, that is not only visually appealing, but also provides shade and privacy.
It’s no doubt more messy than that, as Kharaji writes, there are also construction, design, development, representation, even pedagogy, activism and speculation factors to consider, but the economic war is always present:
On the one hand, sanctions are viewed as an obstacle, and the cause of Iran’s “global isolation.” This has more than ever created a socio-psychological market for the cultivation of things that are “modern,” “western,” “global,” and “foreign.” On the other hand, sanctions are viewed as a rather positive force—an opportunity to build an Islamic economy independent of Western imperial influences. Such nationalistic reactions, which are tied to the spatial discourses of colonialism, globalization, and modernism, have also influenced architectural practices in terms of design, material culture, and financial calculations.
To build on this, I argue that sanctions have simultaneously worked as a closing and opening mechanism. In other words, they may have closed the borders to certain goods, capital and material flows, but they have also opened it to particular ideologies and cultural economies. This resembles the inherent polarities within the word “sanction” itself—a contronym, which means “permission,” and “deterrent” at the same time. The invocation of sanctions as a contronym has a value as an analytical framework because Iran has suffered from massive sanctions in the past few decades, but what this work has found is the process by which Iranian people and the Iranian state “sanction” themselves. Sanction here does not mean the deterrence that was imposed on them, but the permission Iranians have given themselves to respond to the ongoing political and economic instabilities through different cultural and economic strategies.
Such strategies are producing results like the following:
More stylish mid-rise brick housing in Iran, with what looks like a mix of duplex and single storey homes
Designed by Mahsa Moshtaghi pic.twitter.com/yNuyx9Fyip
— Philip Oldfield (@SustainableTall) January 20, 2025
You skipped the best part! pic.twitter.com/QGyOxlDA4b
— Joe Cohen (@CohenSite) November 3, 2025
Koohsar Residential Apartment in Shiraz, Iran by AshariArchitects
https://amazingarchitecture.com/residential-building/koohsar-residential-apartment-in-shiraz-iran-by-ashariarchitects
According to Kharaji’s discussions with Iranian architects, there is no binary between the traditional and the modern; It’s all part of a continuous history—and what an architectural history it is:
Iran has some of the world’s most ancient, important, and beautiful architecture.
So here is a very brief introduction, from ziggurats and Zoroastrian fire temples to crystal mosques and the first ever churches… pic.twitter.com/BcYLNAuxQJ
— The Cultural Tutor (@culturaltutor) June 26, 2023
And embedded in that history—although for a period cast aside—is an emphasis on what’s become an urgent necessity.
Environmental Design
In a rapidly heating world there is renewed interest from architects and engineers in ways to keep cool without burning more fossil fuels. And that’s led to a focus on the ancient Persian badgir, or wind tower. (There is some debate about its origins with arguments that they were first developed in ancient Egypt).
The Persian wind tower (بادگیر) or how a 700-year-old air conditioner could cool an environment up to 12°C with no electricity.
[Credit: Never Enough Architecture] pic.twitter.com/bSSLJBv2Ap
— Chris (@ishiguzochris) November 12, 2023
Conventional air conditioning already accounts for a fifth of total electricity consumption globally, and the wind catcher provides yet another reminder that there are plenty of ways to address the climate crisis in the past if we care to look—and suffer some minor inconvenience.
While wind catchers are attempting a comeback in Iran, they have, in various forms, been adopted elsewhere at times. From the BBC:
In the UK, some 7,000 variations of wind catchers were installed in public buildings between 1979 and 1994. They can be seen from buildings such as the Royal Chelsea Hospital in London, to supermarkets in Manchester.
These modernised wind catchers bear little resemblance to Iran’s towering structures. On one three-storey building on a busy road in north London, small hot pink ventilation towers allow passive ventilation. Atop a shopping centre in Dartford, conical ventilation towers rotate to catch the breeze with the help of a rear wing that keeps the tower facing the prevailing wind.
The US too has adopted wind-catcher-inspired designs with enthusiasm. One such example is the visitor center at Zion National Park in southern Utah. The park sits in a high desert plateau, comparable to Yazd in climate and topography, and the use of passive cooling technologies including the wind catcher nearly eliminated the need for mechanical air-conditioning. Scientists have recorded a temperature difference of 16C (29F) between the outside and inside of the visitor centre, despite the many bodies regularly passing through.
Such technology has the added bonus of helping to reduce shared air in our new age of pandemics. And in urban areas where air pollution is a major concern they help to mitigate the accumulation of indoor pollutants, creating healthier living and working environments.
And there are plenty of ways to improve the ancient design to make them even more effective.
Beyond wind towers, there are other ways Iranian architects are today using bricks to increase shade:
Hooba Design in Iran are doing some of the best urban infill architecture I know of – a thread🧵
Architecture that celebrates shade, materials and craft
This is Sharif Office Building in Tehran pic.twitter.com/wd8Urz3fod
— Philip Oldfield (@SustainableTall) May 22, 2024
Here’s the Hitra Office Building in Tehran.
Not sure about pet safety, but it aims to bring natural light deep into the building while preventing overheating. It uses a brick-clad steel frame, and instead of the typical light well in the building’s center, it has been placed on the sun-filled southern edge where there is a “scoop” that overlooks a new public square.
Interiors pic.twitter.com/gWpIiMlvwT
— Philip Oldfield (@SustainableTall) May 22, 2024
There are also examples of shade, natural light, and ventilation:
A powerful approach to facade design in Iranian apartments – where privacy, shade and ventilation are prioritised
Brick apartment building in Dezful, Iran, by Bio-Design Architects pic.twitter.com/1QP4BZIoAG
— Philip Oldfield (@SustainableTall) December 8, 2025
Beautiful Buildings
I’m tempted to say that if someone wants to get some of these photos in front of Trump—who seems to appreciate buildings more than most people—maybe that would help dissuade him from leading yet more greedy violence on behalf of Zionist oligarchs. Trump did, after all, issue an executive order last year to make federal buildings beautiful again.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, though.
Source.
Trump’s executive order calls for more classical architecture. Iran has buildings like that too.
Motifs and decorations on a stone Roman façade, Tehran. Source: Razieh Ghorbani Kharaji.
While reading up on Iranian architecture I came across one building, however, that seems right up Trump’s alley.
Students Fereshteh Asadzadeh and Ivo Pekec, developed a satirical apartment complex project, “The House Tehran is Talking About” that combines multiple layers of western historical architecture.
“The House Tehran is Talking About.”
Here’s Asadzadeh describing its origins:
The typical upper class residence in Tehran is deeply postmodern in its nature, with very similar stylistic tendencies. Their architectural language returns to historic elements, but without any regard for their traditional virtue (like symmetry, unity, purity), instead abusing them in the most shallow way imaginable way for only their aesthetic properties and for their connotations with power, wealth and exclusion. Elements like epistyles, colonnades, cornices, architectural orders (Dorian, Ionian and Corinthian) and ornaments from all epochs imaginable, from antiquity to Art Nouveau, form an heretical ensemble that stands in indifference to the context it is built in. Soaked in historic remembrance and paraphernalia, and playing an absurd game of historic quotes, they result in an architectural cacophony with capital as its only conductor, radiating with vehemence and excess.
