Development, architecture, and the formation of heritage in late twentieth-century Iran

(Un)Settled Monument: Tehran’s Shahyad Square in the Revolutionary Crucible

“…8 More recent scholarship by Ali Mozaffari and Nigel Westbrook has focused on the urban location of the edifice in relation to the airport and middleclass housing estates and the role it has played as a national image for the state. 9 But the significance of Shahyad's story does not lie exclusively in the static form of the imposing physical monument. In fact, a historically oriented close reading of intended or improvised purposes of the square that surrounds it opens up new ways to read how radical transformations leave residues and sedimentation in the urban space, focusing not only on its permanent but also its temporally fleeting, and often ignored, meanings and significations.…”