Polsheer House, Isfahan
New Julfa is the Armenian quarter of Isfahan, possibly Iran’s most magnificent historical city. Shah Abbas I, the greatest of the Safavid monarchs, transplanted the Armenian community here in the sixteenth century to give a boost to his new capital. Inveterate traders and artisans, they were intended as the entrepreneurial seed for Isfahan’s economy. They might not have had much choice, but the Armenians did well: Abbas built them a huge cathedral and New Julfa contains several large merchants’ houses. Today there is still a strong community of Armenians here, who have retained their language and culture. Even under the Islamic Republic, their religious rights are guaranteed, and they are exempted from the nationwide ban on alcohol.
Wandering through these streets in search of an Armenian church, we came across something unexpected.
Above the entrance to Polsheer House. Yes, that's the coat of arms still used by the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office.
A rainy day in the streets of New Julfa
Polsheer House is a remarkable place in several ways. A building with Persian, Armenian and European identities, it has been the headquarters of a trading family, served as the British consulate in Isfahan, and now houses Polsheer, a contemporary Iranian architecture firm. The story of this building, and the firm that restored and now uses it as a studio, is also the story of Iran, but not the one familiar in the western media.
Polsheer are one of Iran’s leading architecture firms, designing private and public projects within Iran and beyond. Its founder, Mohammad Reza Ghaneei, studied and worked in Iran, France and the USA. His experiences working on the restoration of French chateaux helped inform his work on the restoration of Polsheer House, a 400 hundred year old mansion built by the Aghanorourian family, who owned it for seven generations.
The family acted as agents of the British government in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This explains the presence of the British royal coat of arms above the building’s entrance, as well as some curious Victorian engravings set into the otherwise quite traditional interiors. There are line drawings of steamships, buildings in London and notable Victorian personages. It’s quite unexpected to see in a seventeenth century merchant’s house in the heart of Iran.
When Dr Ghaneei’s team started work on restoring the house, it was in an advanced state of dilapidation. He explains:
‘Our restoration work has inspired us in our own work. For example, how do you get into the house’s interior spaces? It is not in a single direction, not axial. Instead the circulation pattern rotates around the central courtyard. We are using this kind of thing in our work, but not exactly. We are not copying this in our work. Some critics say we are presenting the new face of Iranian contemporary architecture. Our work is contemporary, but not just western. We are presenting a form of architecture that is unique to our country. It is uniquely Iranian, and contemporary.’
What is so interesting about this place is its multilayered identity, both past and present. In its basic design it is an example of Persian domestic architecture, attuned to the extremes of the central Iranian climate. Rooms are arrayed around a central courtyard, designed to be used according to the time of day and season.
The eastern side of a house is called the Shahneshin, or ‘seat of the king’, because of its cooling breezes in hot summers. In the winter, south-facing rooms would be occupied to get the benefit of solar heat; wheras in the summer, the north-facing rooms, which get less heat, are used.
What remains of the former house is just one courtyard, the public and reception rooms of the former family mansion. The interiors are both intimate and fabulously grand.
In restoring the building, Dr Ghaneei and his team have added another distinct historical layer. The building’s original fabric and decoration have been respected, but where new intervention has been necessary, it has avoided historical pastiche. Traditional Persian architectural vocabulary has been deployed in distinctly new ways. Mirrored tilework is found in many older buildings in Iran on walls and alcoves, to bounce sunlight into the darker corners of rooms.
Mirrored alcove in the Chehil Sutun Palace, Isfahan
Contemporary mirrored mosaic wall in Polsheer House, bouncing light into an otherwise windowless space
Dr Ghaneei is part of a generation of architects in Iran who draw on both their own country’s cultural heritage and International Modernism. For him, the choice is not either/or. He cites the American architect Louis Kahn as an important influence on his design philosophy. His work, he says, is ‘contemporary, but not just western in spirit. We are presenting a form of architecture that is unique to our country. It is both uniquely Iranian, and contemporary.’
