Challenges of Applying Traditionalist Thought and Necessity of Rethinking in Contemporary Iranian Architecture

The relationship between tradition and modernity is a wide-ranging issue that has been addressed in many fields, including architecture as a significant realm of cultural identity manifestation. As a 20th century intellectual school, which claims to revive the tradition and save humanity, traditionalism has been able to take effective steps in understanding the concepts of past architecture. However, it has failed to institutionalize the effective application of non-temporal traditional perspectives in contemporary architecture. In seeking reasons for it, this article tries, through a descriptive-analytical method and referring to the writings of traditionalists and other related texts, to achieve knowledge about the practical results and the role of traditionalist thought and discourse in contemporary architecture. Findings indicate that the detachment of the traditional thought from the everyday language, in addition to the traditionalists' approach to history and human beings as well as the lack of attention to internal critique, not only made it difficult to apply the principles of traditionalism in practice but also affected the emergence of the challenge of tradition in the contemporary architecture. Consequently, as for identity-seeking through traditionalism, it is necessary to rethink the extreme differentiation and demarcations that have taken the concepts of tradition out of the context of life. In architecture, more attention to the structural perspective instead of mere semantic or formal perspectives, awareness of the non-traditional perspective, and avoidance of excessive pragmatism can help the realization of original and identity-oriented architecture.