Reading the Relationship between Historicism and the Concept of Identity in the Modern Architecture Heritage of Tehran (1310-1320)

The heritage of early modern architecture in the first Pahlavi era, represents the concept of identity in a new domain which could be attributed to discontinuity of traditional Iranian architecture. Historical architecture in the first Pahlavi era is one of the first attempts made to protract the identity of Iranian architecture in its new shape. The present study was an attempt to retrieve the roots and levels of the historical approach in the first Pahlavi era to explain how identity remains embedded in the modern architectural heritage of this era.

in the present qualitative study, a descriptive-analytical approach is used to decipher the relationship between the cultural values of modern architectural heritage and the concept of identity in architecture. Using relevant documents, the researcher has tried to explore the trend of architecture formation in the Pahlavi era. By studying library sources, the researcher has also tried to analyze the concept of identity in architecture as well as components affiliated with that. In the next step, an inferential approach is used to investigate the relationship between historicism and identity development in the modern architecture heritage and the results are used to analyze a series of selected buildings associated with the historicism current of the first Pahlavi era.

Imitative, schematic and conceptual historicism are three components of retrospective approach that are directly correlated with different levels of identity: formal, inferential and semantic.

In the architectural heritage of the first Pahlavi era, Identity is, from a historical perspective, formally transferred through a direct perception and objective adaptation to the attributes of historical architecture in Iran. In the wake of that, another group of buildings was formed, which transferred identity through content representation and as a result of indirect use of Iranian architectural elements and the refinement and abstraction of historical components. Despite emphasizing on similarities, these buildings actually depict a cultural distinction in architectural heritage of this era.