Analyzing the Intellectual Evolutions of Architectural Design during the Pahlavi Era

Glancing through the contemporary architecture of Iran and its different generations during the Pahlavi era, it seems that there have been notions and ideas regarding the architecture which can be considered as a specific current in the architecture of Iran based on different elements of architecture criticism; then the aim of this study is to scrutinize those notions and ideas and their transformation process.  The following research, in terms of goals, is a development-research project and it is an exploratory research in the terms of essence and quality. The data collection method is library and field research. This research aims to identify the tendencies and approaches of the different generations of contemporary architecture base on the case study method and analyzing the notions and intellectual currents of the architects in the context of their works and answer these questions: What are the concepts and thoughts that have been employed by the architects in this era? Are there any meaningful transformations in these concepts and thoughts? And finally, how have  these transformation been? It is presumed that defining the tendencies of the contemporary architects during the Pahlavi era, from Iranian modernism to nationalism, renaissance like or market-related classicism can evaluate the value of each work in relation to the historical context of the country, in addition, by defining reliable roots and indexes, the existing theoretical current in contemporary history of the architecture of Iran will be recognized. According to the achieved results from the analysis of architectural works in this era, and also by referring to the descriptions of experts, it seems that the ideas and notions in the contemporary architecture can be categorized into three eras and in the framework of different subjects like structure-forming ideas, stylistic references, etc.