Unhiding The Hidden Portrait Of Pahlavi Women Builders In Sketching The Iranian Modernity: A Reassessment Of The Congress Of Women Architects;

Abstract

During the eight decades of the Pahlavi monarchy, a particular conception of modernity (2) had been generated through several constructs of westernization, centralization and nationalism. The dynamic process through which Iran’s determination of modernity was formed represents an intriguing blend of these concepts within a wider socio-cultural relationship that penetrated the key aspects of the country’s modernization project. The Pahlavis’ revolutionary program (3), indeed, was not only effective in the political sphere, but also in the broader cultural circumstances of modern Iran. In much of the 20th century, an imposed and a pre-defined cultural program (4) dominated the ideological perspective of the Pahlavi state to appropriate their modernist ideology from above. The operation of high-culture in politics was accordingly conceived by royal hands and in particular by the shahbanu of Iran whose significance was exemplified by the very symbolic part she took in the 1967 coronation ceremonies where she was entitled as the first queen-regent in the Iranian history. © 2021, Metu Journal of the Faculty of Architecture. All Rights Reserved.