Megastructure Reloaded: A New Technocratic Approach to Mass Housing Development in Iran

While in the Western world, at the time of the oil crisis in 1973, the megastructure movement was declared ‘dead’ by Reyner Banham, in Iran, the flow of oil income gave a new impulse to the movement. During the 1970s, Iran became the second largest oil exporter in the world, and the high rate of the petro-dollar made high-speed urbanisation possible. To respond to the rapid growth of the urban population density, the Iranian Housing Organisation financed the construction of high-rise residential buildings, and supported transnational collaborations for designing innovative housing projects. Subsequently, Iranian architects together with their international counterparts realised a series of prototypical housing models among which Kuy-e Ekbatan played a distinctive role in the development of urban housing in Tehran. Tehran’s master plan was designed by Victor Gruen as an agglomeration of satellite districts with commercial centres interconnected through a series of motorways. For developing each neighbourhood and giving more space to private cars and commercial amenities, architects and urban designers mostly chose to design a relatively small number of high-rise residential buildings around a shopping centre. However, the Iranian architect, Rahman Golzar who was the director of Tehran Renovation Joint Stock Firm, in collaboration with a New York based architecture firm, ‘Gruzen Partnership’, and the Korean avant-garde architect Kim Swoo Geun developed a collective urban form and a self-contained residential area that led to the formation of a new way of living and a strong collective identity among the residents of Ekbatan. Therefore, by analysing Ekbatan’s urban form and development, this paper reveals how this prototypical model addressed the local culture and society, how the imported models were adapted to local circumstances, and how this transnational collaboration resulted in creating a new collective community and life style. Understanding the development of this model might demonstrates how the Iranian oil industry contributed to alter the megastructure movement.