Notes on City and Architecture

Representatives of the first Iranian parliament, National Military Academy, Tehran, Iran, 1906.  The National Library and Archives of Iran, World Digital Library,  The House of Tyranny: Thoughts on Iran’s Pyramid of Power , a piece I presented  as part of the panel: 'Exhibiting Democracies - Religious and Colonial Assemblies', in  Parliament Buildings Conference  hosted by  the Bartlett School of Architecture and the UCL European Institute. 

  ‘Abadan — The Fruit of British Industry that Persia Covets.’ The Illustrated London News, 8 September 1951 (cited in Damluji, 2013) The Oil and the Brick; Tales of a Scotsman in Persia Ahmadreza Hakiminejad On a late-spring day in 1901, the King of Persia signed a notorious concession and gave the English millionaire William Knox D’Arcy the rights to prospect for and market oil. Seven years later, the black substance was no longer a mystery in the  land of Persia . In 1909, the London-based Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC) was born and by 1912, the liquid began to flow in the pipeline from the oil fields of  Masjed Soleyman  to what was yet to become the world’s largest refinery on the desert island of Abadan; putting a poor, deprived village on the map. This was the time when, far from Abadan, a 25-year-old Scotsman, through “a remarkable stroke of good fortune” [1], was about to join the office of Edwin Lutyens – the empire’s eminent architect – who had just been...

'The Hole' and other photographs (Prints for Sale)  This peculiar view of Paris's beautiful monster (The Hole, 2015), is now available for sale via Photos.com provided by Getty Images. You are also invited to visit my photo gallery on Fine Art America  where you can order prints in a variety of frames and sizes. 

Photograph: Atta Kenare/AFP/Getty Images Architecture and design critic, Oliver Wainwright writes on Tehran for  Guardian Cities  series ‘ The Next 15 Megacities ’. Having been interviewed for his piece, I discuss here a number of critical issues facing the car-centric city; from inane creation of megastructures such as Sadr Expressway, to the implementation of the disastrous Garden-Tower (burj-bāgh) act within the past decade, to the totally-wrong approach of the capital towards its most juvenile Region: 22.  Read the full article here .

Photographs used for this image production taken by Mohsen Ataei (April 2018), and Razieh Rahnama (April 2019) My talk on Tehran's District 22 urban fiasco delivered as part of the panel 'City and Urban Visuality' in  Symposia Iranica's Fourth Biennial Iranian Studies Conference , Divinity Theatre, University of St Andrews, 14 April 2019.  Synopsis On August 30th, 2000, Tehran gave birth to her last offspring, District 22. Spreading over northwest Tehran, it was largely a carte blanche , aimed to be an exemplary model for sustainable development; a beacon of urban planning for the capital. Two decades in the making, the urban scene of District 22 is, arguably, a failure of city design; a mishmash of fruitless, desolated, dispersed satellite towns, centered upon an ill-conceived artificial lake veneer. It is literally a reproduction of Pruitt–Igoe in a massive scale, half a century after its demolition. (Re)reading Peter Hall’s Cities of Tomorrow, and ...

© Amin Aghaei Underline: The Abadan Issue (Persian Edition) The followings are my translation works published in the Persian edition of Underline's 4th issue (The Abadan Issue): Abadan A to Z: Excerpts from Encyclopaedia Abadanica by   Rasmus Christian Elling Reminders Among the Ruins  by   Iante Roach Withholding Patterns by Yusef Sayed Indian Camera, Iranian Heart by Ranjita Ganesan A Theatre Accessible to All by James Tyson منتشرشده در مجله آندرلاین - شماره ویژه آبادان - پاییز 1397 برگردان: احمدرضا حکیمی‌نژاد آبادان‌نامه؛ گزیده‌ای از دائرةالمعارف آبادانیکا | راسموس کریستین الینگ. ص 5 یادگارهایی در میان ویرانه‌ها | یانته روچ. ص 51 اختفای نقش‌ها | یوسف سعید. ص 57  تئاتری برای همگان | جیمز تایسن. ص 81 دوربین هندی، قلب ایرانی | رنجیتا گانیشان. ص 95

Aerial photo of Abbasabad hills in 1975, showing the development of a dense residential fabric around the site. Source: Llewelyn-Davies International, 1976, Farshid Emami (2014). ‘Errors of Scale’: The Story of Tehran’s  Abbasabad Lands Ahmadreza Hakiminejad Published on   Konesh Space From cosmos to atom, what is going to be the reference to scaling cities? This is in fact a very old query. Aristotle in his  Politics , argues that many people think that a city “in order to be happy ought to be large; but even if they are right, they have no idea what is a large and what a small” city 1 . Referring to the city’s size of population in ancient Greece, the philosopher was not so fond of a city made up of what he called “too few persons”. For him, creating a “too populous” one did not seem to be a good idea either:  “it is difficult – perhaps impossible – for a city that is too populous to be well managed” 1 . The fact is that t he word scal...