Kamran Diba

He is an Iranian architect, urban planner, painter and artist living in Spain and France. Simultaneously with the modernization of Iran during the Pahlavi era, in a short period of 10 years, he has been the designer and architect of important residential and public complexes, including Tehran Cultural Center and Shafaq Park, Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, Niavaran Cultural Center and the half-completed Shushtar new city project.

The half-finished project of “New Shushtar City” in Khuzestan, which he was the architect and planner of, owes its success to the structural patterns and traditional building types used by Diba. He replaced this method with design based on western patterns, which was supported by influential people and leaders.

This city with a population capacity of over 30,000 people was designed along a main communication highway. At the intersections, public squares and small neighborhoods were formed around it, and the presence of gardens and markets strengthened social life. Diba’s poetic brick buildings create an architectural landmark that is beautiful and majestic. His other significant works in Iran include several buildings in Jundishapur University.

Diba served as a consultant and urban planner in the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development of Iran. Also, his office presented a comprehensive plan for some cities, including Khorramshahr, an important port in the Persian Gulf. where he collaborated with the Greek designer A. Doxias who was working in the private sector.

He left Iran in 1977 with the intention of living in Paris and Washington DC to work privately. His projects include house building plans in Virginia and hotel development plans in Spain. In 1977, he worked as a critic with “Cornell” University. As a painter, Diba held several solo exhibitions in Iran. He was also a collector and intermediary in the sale of Western contemporary paintings.

Before the construction of the Museum of Contemporary Arts, Kamran Diba built Shafaq Park and Cultural Center in Yousef Abad, and in the construction of this collection, he was also inspired by Iranian and modern architecture.

Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art with an area of ​​approximately 2000 square meters on the west side of Tehran’s Laleh Park is the most well-known work of Kamran Dibast, which was designed and managed by him, and is considered to be his brainchild.

According to him, his primary goal was to collect the art of time and make it available to the public in the form of a collection.

The architecture of the Museum of Contemporary Arts can be seen as a reflection of the artistic and intellectual ideas of the era, an era when most of the artists and cultural planners in Iran sought to reconcile tradition and modernism. The museum building is a combination of traditional Iranian architectural motifs and modern architectural patterns.

Despite the materials, functionality and even the modernist aesthetics of this building, it is not difficult to recognize the elements of traditional Iranian architecture in it. The vestibule and the square, the courtyard and the central pond and even the wind turbine are some of the Iranian elements used in it.

Kamran Diba says this about tradition in architecture: “If we want to talk only about tradition, this discussion is non-physical and not architecture at all; then we mean the traditional aspects that are related to a reaction between tradition and the physical environment. We will talk about the impact of this reaction with architecture, whether we can modernize traditions or destroy them by force and force? Are the things they did in this field successful or are these traditions still alive and we should preserve them? The fact is that tradition plays an effective role and this is undeniable. Some traditions are “conscious” and some are “unconscious”. If we break the tradition, the reaction will be negative. He lives in the corridor. In fact, there are traditions and habits that make an Iranian sit in his yard at night, and if we want to take it away from him, he can sit there again. So we conclude that the actions that contradict the tradition may cause a negative reaction or rebellion, which I think is to some extent Because the cause of discomfort is not clear and this factor affects people’s behavior and actions. For example, one does not like the reason or does not want to go to a building. So, if we want to create a human architecture, we must consider people’s and their desires, and if people’s behavior and desires are not considered. If we don’t, we cannot create human architecture.

He says that he likes the works of “Le Corbusier” very much and finds his works and some works of “Frank Lloyd-Wright” as well as the works of “Ludwig Mies-Vanderro” to be influential on him due to their understatement and elegance and the use of new technology, and adds that their influence can be seen in the museum building. In the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, the galleries are stacked around a central space similar to the Guggenheim Museum in New York by “Frank Lloyd-Wright”.

Features of Kamran Diba’s joint works

1. Maintaining silence and dignity in all his work
2. Emphasis on axes in architecture and urban planning
3. Successive failure of visual paths and axes
4. Paying attention to details and arrangement of surfaces
5. Most of his designs are created from the montage of relatively simple volumes, in which the gaps of the windows and the significant volume of the columns are visible, which is one of the common aspects of his works and the school of New Brutalism.
6. The use of volumetric works of art in the design of urban spaces and landscaping and gardening
7. The dominant tendency to blend the characteristics of Iranian architecture with modern architecture (the main characteristic of all the buildings built by Diba, which gave it the aspect of modeling).

Kamran Diba’s intellectual and theoretical tendencies

1. His interest in the social aspects of architecture or in his own interpretation (human architecture)
2. Interest and respect for local traditions and structural patterns as well as the needs of modern urban society to achieve comfort
3. Not occupying the environment to create a place
4. In the fusion of his works with his surroundings, which has made his works not strange and alien while being original.
5. Using Iranian architectural patterns in original and unique ways in his works.

Diba’s intellectual and theoretical tendencies

Diba’s works during his 12-year career in Iran show his special interest in the social aspects of architecture or, in his own words, “human architecture”. He meant by human architecture a committed and beneficial work for society and people. His great interest in urban design, urban planning and gardening also originated from this intellectual trend. In fact, he had no desire to design private buildings (his only private work was designing the private house of his friend Parviz Tanavoli Pikeretrash) and all his attention was focused on the design of public and cultural buildings for public benefit and mass housing, in which he played the role of idea creator and planner.

He himself says:

I didn’t want to design a villa for the upper floors. At that time, I believed that architecture, especially in Iran, actually only serves the bourgeois class and the wealthy in the society, and through better urban planning, we can take steps to meet the needs of the society. That was the reason why, after completing my studies in architecture, I got a master’s degree in sociology and participated in the design of Columbia town (between Washington and Baltimore). I started my work in Iran by establishing an office called “Urban Planning and Social Planning Institute”, which many thought was a government institution at first. But I soon realized that it is not so easy to get hold of my favorite projects.

Diba’s social sensitivities and interest in urban planning are evident in his first projects

His first work in Iran was the design of a public park (Shafaq Park) with an area of ​​several thousand square meters in the area of ​​garbage accumulation in a neighborhood, at a time when urban parks of several hectares were built in cities, especially in Tehran. After that, he designed a summer camp for orphanage children in Shaheswar. In this plan, he tried to build a model village for the northern cities according to the local architecture, and for the first time, he used the northern rural pottery, which was made by hand and completely fragile, and the engineers considered it unsafe and low level. Shafaq Park is designed in such a way that all the surrounding streets lead to it and pass through it. With this plan, the park has been integrated into the life of the neighborhood. At the same time, in this project, for the first time, Diba invented the idea of ​​culture and building a center for social services at the neighborhood level. He encouraged the intellectual development center to open a children’s library unit and a painting workshop there. In this project, Diba stubbornly preserved an old low-value building to strengthen the link between the park and the past and turned it into a place for performances and social activities at the neighborhood level. He tried to turn the park into the center of the neighborhood and a place for people to gather by building a theater and a library for adults.

In Jundishapur University, following his inclination towards urban design and urban planning, Diba was very willing to prepare the comprehensive plan of the university in order to be able to build his desired complex, but the president of the university at the time, who used several different consulting engineers, did not want to clash with the architect of the community plan and referred individual projects to his office. Diba says: “After thinking a lot, I planned a war tactic to prepare a hidden comprehensive plan. I considered three bases far apart so that I can plan the distance between them in the scope of a comprehensive plan. The first base of the plan was the indoor sports hall, which was expanded later. The second design was related to the student dining room, where I considered a prayer room and later separated it and placed it as a university mosque in the open space in front of the dining room. All the buildings in this complex are actually a means of pedestrian construction.”

In his other works, Diba sought to create a variety of cultural and entertainment centers, including libraries, galleries, theaters, and restaurants in the form of activity complexes, which has been implemented in Niavaran cultural center.

Apparently, these trends, in addition to the aesthetic aspects of Iranian urban architectural traditions, aroused interest and respect for these traditions in him. Diba accepted modernism and modernity and went in search of realist or realistic traditionalism. He was against taking Western architecture as a model for Iranian society and tried to establish a link between modernism and Iranian traditions. According to him, the architecture and urban planning of New York and Hong Kong could not and cannot be modeled on Iranian architecture and urban planning, because the vastness of the land, social relations and Iranian relationship with the earth and the sky do not reflect such examples.

It was based on this belief that when the attention to building a tower as a symbol of progress and progress to resemble the capital of Iran to the European capitals was noticed by the authorities and officials of the time, Diba invited several well-known international personalities, Frederoch, the designer of Milton Keynes, England, Mathews Engers, the famous German architect, the managing director of the company that built Roosevelt Island, Manhattan, New York, and Peter Blake, the American architect critic, to visit Iran’s housing and urban planning activities and present the results of these visits in a meeting to In the housing policy, it should be taken into consideration by the authorities, but this attempt failed. After that, Diba focused his efforts on the design of Shushtar New town, as a suitable model of Iranian settlement and urbanization.

At the time when the preparation of Yusuf Abad park plan was communicated to Diba’s office, and it is rare for him to receive various professional expertise in Iran, it was inevitable that he would play the role of a garden architect. Yusuf Abad Park was his first work in this field, which he did well. Shafaq Park is the first park designed as a public garden in the continuity of neighborhood streets. Other projects of Diba Gardening are: Gardening and development of the garden of Niavaran Cultural Center and the administrative office in the north of the garden, landscaping west of Jundi Shapur University, green space design, landscaping and design of the squares of Shushtar town, which could not be completed.

Another of Diba’s works in this field is the design of the space and landscaping of the west side of Tulip Park, that is, in fact, the area north of the museum up to the carpet museum. He opened a new axis for the park by creating a gate and determining the location of kiosks to attract the attention of the crowd in the north of the museum. Diba says: In this plan, I disagreed with Reza Majed, Farmanfarmaian’s office partner, who was responsible for the supervision and implementation of the carpet museum, regarding the entry of cars into the park area, but finally I imposed my own plan. Reza Majid told me that I was bullying. I answered jokingly, until now you have told others to force, listen to force once, what will happen! In this design, with a series of fountains and a wall, a novel entrance was created between the park and the city street, which had a certain simplicity and clarity. One of the interesting elements of this design is the design of a prayer house, which, according to an Arab architect, is the purest and simplest form of a mosque. The idea of ​​creating this prayer house came to my mind when I saw the workers of the museum building and some passers-by praying in this area, but in the wrong direction.

We asked the cleric of one of the local mosques to determine the Qibla direction. When the right direction was determined, I thought that creating a quiet space, away from the noise of the street, would be interesting and useful for the worshipers.

In a sense, it can be said that Diba is considered the founder of gardening in Iran in the contemporary period, and the interesting point in his gardening work is the special attention to the issue of water scarcity and the problems of maintaining green spaces in Iran’s climate.

In addition to architecture, Kamran Diba also painted. During his career in Iran, he played an effective role in collective art activities during that period, which was completed and sustained by designing and planning the activities of the Museum of Contemporary Arts.

At the beginning of his activity in Iran, he organized two original shows in Iran, while gathering artists from visual arts disciplines in an art center. In the first show, titled “Open Water, Rough Hand”, painting, volume and sound were used. The speech of the show was written as a new poem by Diba himself. Parviz Tanavoli and a female announcer performed it and it was played continuously during the show.

In addition to these activities, Diba has made extensive use of large-scale works of art in the design of urban spaces and landscaping and gardening. He ordered three figures for his first big work, Shafaq Park, and three more for the Niavaran Culture Center to Parviz Tanavoli. The characters were all ordinary people who happened to spend time in this space. These figures were very popular with the public and photographers made a living by taking pictures of people next to them or holding their hands. Other works of art by Karl Schleminger and other artists have been installed in the premises of the Museum of Contemporary Art. Later, Diba was able to find an opportunity to satisfy his deep artistic tendencies in the Museum of Contemporary Arts of Iran, and he, who was actually the planner and creator of this project, played an active role in the purchase and preparation of the Iranian and international art collection of the museum and its administrative organization.

One of his important projects in the last years of his work in Iran is the administrative center of Isfahan city, inspired by the traditional introverted fabric.

In the years of his stay abroad, he abandoned architecture at first. He himself says that architecture meant something to me in the context of a vast, diverse, beautiful country with a rich and familiar culture.