ABSTRACT
When in 1961 Mohammad Reza Shah, the King of Iran, initiated a series of land reforms that were to accelerate Iran’s modernization process under the heading ‘White Revolution’, he commissioned Victor Gruen, an Austrian– American architect-planner with abundant experience in the design of shopping malls to redesign Tehran. Apart from its conceptual correspondence with the American shopping mall, Ekbatan’s linear shopping centre also formally resembles a traditional bazaar. The Korean architect Kim Swoo Geun, who was responsible for the development of phase 2, however, developed a different interpretation of the shopping mall for Ekbatan. International practices in 1970s Tehran show how the global oil market led to a transnational flow of ideas that directly affected architecture. The concept of Ekbatan corresponds closely with Victor Gruen’s concept of a shopping centre. It is neither a ‘machine for selling’ nor a ‘nostalgic reminiscence of the village green’, but an essentially urban environment, promoting a novel, commercial collectivity.
