Atelier Education System in Tehran Faculty of Fine Arts: the curriculum of architectural design in the 1950s and 1960s.

From the establishment of the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Tehran in 1940 to the late 1960s, there was an educational system known as the Atelier System. The system peaked in the 1950s and 1960s. This study examines the educational system of the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Tehran in the 1950s and 1960s. This research aims to provide a detailed explanation of the architectural design curriculum in this faculty and to describe how it is taught in the architecture studios of the faculty. The study attempts to describe the faculty's architectural design curriculum by relying on oral sources and written documents and matching these resources together. The official curriculum and also practical curriculum will be explained in this study. The purpose of the study is not to interpret, compare, or evaluate this system of education, but to provide a complete and accurate understanding of the system by relying on primary and reliable sources. Next, this research seeks to identify the main features of this system of education by categorizing information obtained from the sources. The study is based on multiple interviews with professors and students who attended the Faculty of Fine Arts in the 1950s and 1960s. The other sources of this research are written documents and curriculums of the faculty that compiled for this research. This research has a historical approach and also utilized oral history and document-research techniques. The architectural education system of the Faculty of Fine Arts in the 1950s and 1960s had a coherent and distinct program. The architecture ateliers were the main place of this educational system. This coherent system had remarkable features. The atelier system was an independent, open and free system. The spirit of competition was flowing in all parts of the education. Atelier's professor was the students' ideal. Students trusted the thought and art of him. Followed by the professor, upper-year students were responsible for training lower-year students during a hierarchy. In this way of teaching, the artistic and visual aspects of architecture were more important. This system of education has always been associated with the École des Beaux-Arts education system. The review of this curriculum reveals that the generality, content, resources, and common terms were derived from an École des Beaux- system as a foreign educational system. Although there appear to be differences in the details. It is clear that the Faculty of Fine Arts, as a member of the University of Tehran, and not an independent school of architecture, was subject to the rules and regulations of the University of Tehran. After a long run, the era of the Atelier system was ended in the late 1960s at the same time with the transformations of the University of Tehran and the global changes in architectural education. The next step of this research is investigating how changes occurred in the education system and defining what was the contexts, and the internal and external factors affecting these changes.