Kashan House, Iran, 2019

First published Issue AT299
Architecture Today June 2019

Refurbishment & Renovation

Sublime and Sustainable

Ian Ritchie discovers an exquisite transformation of a crumbling historic house in Iran by designer Parisa Manouchehri

Kashan is an oasis city at the foot of the Zagros mountain range that runs along the western edge of Iran’s central high arid salt desert. The climate is harsh and windy, with cold dry winters and hot summers.

While it sits next to archeological sites dating back 8000 years, Kashan witnessed a golden age from the twelfth to fourteenth centuries when its unrivalled skills in pottery and tile production brought great prosperity, and it became a vibrant city with a complex urban structure and discriminating architecture.

The city’s water, its source of life, was originally conducted from the mountains through a network of underground aqueducts (qanats), now mostly in disrepair. The qanats also drove a natural ventilation system that was used in the various building types. In the traditional Persian house, wind towers, whose orientation is highly location-specific, pulled cool air and humidity from the qanats to mitigate the summer’s heat. In the historic core of Kashan, today a city of 400,000, a great number of historic courtyard houses are now in a derelict state, though quite a few have been or are being restored and revitalised. Most date from the nineteenth century, built after a devastating earthquake in 1778 levelled much of the city.

The Saadat Historic House was a partially collapsed ruin before its current owner, Parisa Manouchehri, a designer and passionate activist for the preservation of Kashan’s architectural heritage, began its restoration. Recently completed, the house now exhibits a refined and restrained aesthetic within which creative details and contemporary furniture coexist harmoniously with traditional objects against the backdrop of the natural local materials employed in the reconstruction.

Persian architecture has symmetry. It embodies a hierarchical spatial system; the similitude with nature – base, stem and leaf – is reflected in Kashan’s ceramic arts as the body, neck and mouth of a vase, but finds its reverse logic in its architecture: containment (vestibule), transition (corridor) and culmination (the courtyard).

The typology of these dwellings evolved subtly over the centuries with a high level of architectural sophistication in plan and section. Their spatial poetry suggests that nature’s own light pen may have formed them, inspired by human understanding.