The Idea of the Past in Architects’ Thinking: Vartan Hovanessian, the Recent Past, the Distant Past

Our understanding of contemporary architecture and its relation to the past has formed historically against the backdrop of a complex network of various individuals and other contextual factors. A prominent figure representative of such an understanding is Vartan Hovanessian. His decades-long activities included diverse fields such as criticism and authorship, corporate activity, and architectural design. This article answers the question of his intellectual position regarding the relationship between the architecture of his time and that of the past. It examines the network of thoughts, individuals, events, interactions, and other factors to draw a comprehensive picture that goes beyond a scholarly monograph of the architect. The research mainly relies on primary sources especially his articles, using the historical method to construct a narrative of his intellectual positions on the relation of past and present architecture during the three decades of his professional activity in Iran. This research shows that “the past” appears in Hovanessian’s thinking in two distinct ways: the “distant past” and the “recent past”. The “distant past” in all of his writings includes all historical periods of Iranian architecture up to its peak, i.e., the Safavid era, while the “recent past” starts a few decades before the publication of his first articles. However, the works and the time frame he suggests for the architecture of the “recent past” vary in the articles he published during the 1320s and 1340s SH. His different intellectual positions towards the past in each period can be explained in relation to modern architecture and to his perspective of the future as manifested in the European and Western ideals of modernism.