Iran_Lab | Shared Research and Education
Internationalisation Unit - Department PDTA Sapienza, University of Rome
Scientific Coordinator prof. arch. Alessandra De Cesaris
IRAN_LAB
Relations and cultural exchanges between the Iranian Schools of Architecture and the Faculty of Architecture at Sapienza University have a long tradition. A large number of professors and scholars, who have left important studies on urban planning and architecture in Islamic territories, have trained within our school. Our libraries preserve a large number of specialised volumes on Islamic architecture and urbanism that constitute an important and valuable reference for students and researchers from both countries. Our degree courses welcome many students every year, some of whom continue their academic training in the doctorate; as a whole, every year they produce studies and works of considerable interest, which are not always valued and whose traces are often lost.
IranLab, in keeping with the PDTA Department's cultural project, is part of this strand of cultural exchanges between scholars, researchers, PhD students and students in the fields of design, technology and urban regeneration, with the aim of coordinating, directing and enhancing research and studies on Iranian architecture, experimenting, where possible, with forms of contamination between the two cultures.
Fields of interest
CULTURAL HERITAGE
- Iran is a country with an immense architectural and cultural heritage. A heritage that concerns as much the material aspects from works of art to systems of objects as the intangible aspects. Preservation and valorisation operations are therefore a priority objective, operations that are able to foreground a reflection on the future of these assets, both tangible and intangible, and know how to correctly interpret the relations between the individual asset and the territorial and/or urban context in which it is located.
- Iran is a country with a cultural and material heritage that is both rich and less invested in mass tourism. This represents an opportunity not only for the wealth of its cultural heritage but also for the possibility of setting up a virtuous system of sustainable tourism capable of regenerating the assets present in the territory (network of caravanserais, minor villages, etc.).
URBAN REGENERATION
- The regeneration of suburbs built according to the schemes of the Modern Movement, totally unsuitable for housing the social classes for which they were intended at the time (lack of open spaces and gardens.
- The search today for the modernisation of certain aspects of traditional Iranian domestic space, (aspects that have fallen into oblivion due to too rapid a modernisation of living spaces). A modernisation that fatally has to confront the cost of land, with problems of building density.
- Research into the definition of new types of public space that are able to meet the needs of today after the period of the Revolution that saw public space retreat into (more protected) private space.
- The role of the qanat network in the regeneration of densely built-up tissue.
GREEN BUILDING APPROACH, GREEN CITY APPROACH
The Persian architectural tradition boasts a heritage of passive energy systems for air conditioning that deserves to be reinterpreted in the light of contemporary requirements.
DESIGN AND EXHIBIT DESIGN
In this area, study and research activities concern the history of decorative arts, handicrafts, the ceramic tradition, and the many aspects of contemporary Iranian design: product, graphic and multimedia, exhibit design in particular exhibition and museum spaces, and design for public space. In fact, there is a young generation of architects in Iran that was formed after the Revolution in search of ways to reinterpret elements of the architectural tradition with newly produced designs and materials in a contemporary key, without lapsing into nostalgic formulas.