Megastructure Reloaded: A New Technocratic Approach to Housing Development in Ekbatan, Tehran

Abstract

Under the USA's free-market foreign policy in the 1960s and 1970s, the Tehran Redevelopment Company (TRC) in collaboration with a New York firm, Starrett Housing Corporation, undertook one of the most extensive and innovative Middle Eastern public housing projects. * As part of Tehran's masterplan designed by the Austrian-American urban planner Victor Gruen -aided by Iranian architect Abdolaziz Farmanfarmaian -the scheme accommodated 15,500 low-and middle-income families, especially those of civil servants, in an area that became known as Shahrak-e Ekbatan (Ekbatan). On one hand, the development aimed to change the everyday life of middle-class people; on the other, it sought to institute a capitalist economy with a bias towards rapid industrialisation. To achieve these objectives, the TRC asked Gruzen and Partners (USA) and Space Group (South Korea) to create a prototypical model: they selected the strongly collective urban form of a Brutalist concrete megastructure. Noting the influence of US President Jack Kennedy's doctrine for developing countries during the Cold War, this article reveals how the Ektaban scheme addressed local culture and society, while also accommodating change over time. As a Middle Eastern Modernist megastructure, it was erected after Reyner Banham in 1973 had declared that typology 'dead' in the Western world.

Listening in/for Ekbatan

“…As part of this program, aimed at providing mass housing primarily for the capital's growing middle-class population, the Tehran Redevelopment Company (TRC) planned the pilot project for Ekbatan in 1972 'under the leadership of Rahman Golzar Shabestari, a young Iranian architect' (Sedighi 2018: 11). The TRC employed the US-based Gruzen and Partners architecture firm in 1974 to design East Ekbatan, and the South-Korea-based Space Group architecture office in 1976 to design West Ekbatan (Sedighi 2018). Rahman Golzar and his Iranian architectural team also played an important part in developing Ekbatan, particularly in designing the public spaces, including a bazaar-like environment that 'activated the public life of residents at ground level, with integral gardens and parks.'…”