Architecture & Design Shortlist

This series explores a part of Iran’s historical architectural heritage; a land where, over centuries, patterns of settlement, public spaces, and structures have shaped the experience of living and the understanding of space. These buildings are the product of accumulated knowledge, emerging from the climate, local materials, and cultural life, and reflect a carefully measured relationship between humans and the land. Within them, function, structure, and meaning coexist in balance. The photographer notes that documenting these historic buildings ‘is a form of responsibility, in a country continuously experiencing hardship and sorrow.’ They still stand, ‘a resilient presence in the landscape of the present.’ This series is an effort to observe, read, and record this continuity: ‘to show that architecture can remain a living memory and a narrator of identity, even in challenging times.’