Villa Talk Issue 17

May 4, 2025

Amir Abbas Aboutalebi: Could you describe your background and the context in which you grew up?
Alireza Taghaboni: I didn’t grow up in an artistic family or one shaped by formal cultural traditions. My father was an army officer, my mother managed the home. Culture existed in the background of everyday life, though never as a profession or a formal family tradition.My earliest formative memory is my uncle’s library room in Tehran. As a child during the war years, that room felt almost like a separate territory detached from ordinary harsh reality, almost otherworldly. I spent hours there, often without fully understanding what I was reading, yet it was the first time I sensed that the world could be approached not only through direct experience, but also through reading, narration, and language.
Both my immediate and extended family maintained an active interest in politics, literature, music, and the visual arts, largely through conversation and informal cultural engagement rather than academic training.
Looking back, that continuous informal exposure quietly shaped me, creating the foundation for my later pursuit in architecture, writing, and institution-building.

 

A.A.: How did the urban environment in which you grew up shape your understanding of space?

A.T.: I was born and raised in Tehranpars, a rapidly expanding neighborhood on Tehran’s eastern edge that emerged after the revolution. This area embodied a new kind of urban modernism—grid layouts, repetitive residential blocks, and streets dictated by planning logic rather than topography or history. It felt like an evolving, incomplete urban fabric.
Beyond its layout, Tehranpars was defined by sharp separations between domains of daily life. The short walk from home to school marked a profound spatial and psychological shift: the domestic world of family, intimate conversations, and cultural exchange gave way to the disciplined, ideologically structured environment of school—especially during the war years.
This contrast instilled an early awareness that spatial boundaries are not just physical, but deeply social and political. It shaped my thinking about interior/exterior conditions, private/public realms, visibility, and enclosure—ideas that recur in my projects through thresholds, layered boundaries, controlled views, and spatial depth.
In the architecture of Gilan, I later encountered a very different spatial logic. There, interior and exterior spaces blend more gradually, mediating visibility and climate with adaptability. In retrospect, Tehranpars taught me the rigidity of imposed spatial order; In the architecture of Gilan, I later encountered a softer and more historically sedimented version of those same spatial conditions.

A.A.: How did your interest in the arts develop during your childhood?

A.T.: My interest in art began not with visual disciplines like painting or architecture, but with literature. In elementary school, novels—especially Jules Verne’s tales of exploration and world-building—shaped how I saw reality and possibility.
A defining moment came from the era’s economic constraints. When I asked my father for money to buy a book, he promised he’d always provide it, no matter the cost. That brief exchange gave books a kind of emotional value for me and strengthened my commitment to reading. My reading later expanded to classical literature and poetry, shifting from recreation to a lens for understanding culture and society. Poetry taught me that meaning is rarely direct, transforming my understanding of interpretation and spatial experience. Visual arts followed in university through art history. Modern and contemporary works expanded my narrative focus into form, material, and concept.
Geometry also proved essential—not as abstract math, but as spatial problem-solving that combined dimension and form. Unlike algebra, it resonated deeply. Architecture ultimately became the point at which these threads converged: narrative thinking, spatial reasoning, and formal structure.
In retrospect, choosing architecture was deliberate, weaving together literature, poetry, geometry, and visual thinking into one discipline.

 

A.A.: How did your relationship with literature begin, and how has it influenced you?

A.T.: My relationship with literature grew gradually into a primary way of interpreting the world. It started with novels but soon revealed reality’s multiple, often conflicting perspectives—showing that human experience rarely follows a single narrative.
During adolescence—when direct expression was often constrained—literature became a vital space for reflection. It offered an indirect way to engage complex social and cultural questions.
This way of thinking reshaped my approach to architecture. Rather than just spatial organization, I began seeing it as spatial narration—where sequence, perception, and interpretation parallel literary structures.
Writing gradually became equally important for me: a way of clarifying thought, confronting contradictions, and recognizing blind spots. For me, writing and architecture are parallel practices, exploring the same concerns through different mediums.

A.A.: When did you first hear about architecture?

A.T.: My first real encounter with architecture came through Dr. Habib’s family. There, the father and two daughters were architects, and their home felt markedly different filled with large realist paintings, ongoing music, and a cultural intensity woven into daily life. In that environment, architecture appeared to me less as a profession than as a cultural mode of existence. This shaped my early understanding of architecture as a cultural framework. My geometry and spatial interests amplified the attraction. When I later learned the term “architect,” it connected separate threads—literature, spatial reasoning, construction, cultural responsibility—into one coherent position.
For me, architecture was never just a career. It was a way to engage the world.

A.A.: How and with what motivation did you enter university architecture during high school? Was this choice conscious or random, influenced by specific people or circumstances?

A.T.: It was very deliberate—the result of interests gradually coming together. In high school, I loved geometry but had no interest in numerical math. For me, geometry wasn’t about solving equations; it was creative exploration, understanding problems in tangible form.
Literature was equally central. Architecture sat perfectly at their intersection: it let me work three-dimensionally while thinking narratively. So, there was no doubt—I applied only to architecture at Iran’s seven state universities and got in.
I entered architectural education believing I would encounter a discipline equally concerned with form and meaning. But formal education often fell short. The distance between expectation and institutional reality became one of the central motivations behind my later trajectory, driving me toward independent practice, writing, and carving out my own professional path.

A.A.: What was your villa project during university, and what did it represent for you at that stage?

A.T.: It’s fascinating to revisit—I hadn’t thought about it deeply until now. The project was designing a residential unit for my own family, which gave it real autonomy beyond a typical student exercise.
The core challenge was independence within dependency: how to carve out a space with its own identity inside the family home. My solution was a semi-autonomous unit—with separate circulation and organization, but neither fully detached nor swallowed by the larger house.
Looking back, those themes foreshadow later projects like “A Villa for a Friend” or “Sharifi-ha House”: boundary conditions, inside/outside relationships, the balance between unique expressive form and abstract volume.
I didn’t have a formal theory then, but there was already an intuitive insight for spatial and formal possibilities—one that reading, writing, and practice would later sharpen into something more systematic.

A.A.: Where did you first encounter architectural practice, and how did it shape your understanding of it?

A.T.: My first real exposure came early in my third semester, when a professor invited me to join Abad Consulting Engineers.
The work was technical—plan coloring, blueprints, drafting far from conceptual design. But eye-opening.
That experience showed me architecture isn’t just the final building; it’s a process shaped by systems, constraints, and negotiation. I learned how projects actually get built, resolved, and delivered.
Looking back, it created a crucial balance between theory and reality. I realized meaningful architecture demands working within existing operational frameworks—even while critically redefining and reinterpreting them.

A.A.: Could you describe your first professional villa project and what it meant for you at that stage?

A.T.: It was for a close friend—We made a proposal and we picked the site together. The project grew gradually over a conversation.
That early project still has considerable semantic and sentimental value for me. Even in its early and unresolved form, the project already contained ideas that would later become central to my work: spatial dualities, sequence-based narrative logic, open/closed transitions, time-varying spaces. Plus, it threw me into construction’s real challenges—extremely intense for a first professional job.
What struck me most was realizing architecture operates on three levels simultaneously: personal connection, conceptual depth, material reality.

A.A.: How would you describe the evolution of your thinking and practice over time?

A.T.: I’d describe it less as linear progress and more as circling back to a few core concerns that have been there from the start—just rearticulated through different scales, forms, and languages.
One constant has been duality, which I systematized later in my book Duals. There I categorized projects by how they handle oppositions: binary pairs, complementary relationships, hybrids, or collages. It wasn’t just formal classification—it was about navigating the social, spatial, cultural contradictions architecture inevitably faces.
Over time, I realized duality better describes the design process and configurational logic of projects rather than final state to their lasting quality. That led to a to a more fundamental question: why do some projects endure beyond the era of their creation?
The answer came through another concept: “thickness”; For me, it is not merely a theoretical approach, but also a materially and historically grounded condition. One might contrast the relative tectonic lightness of certain East Asian traditions with the spatial and material thickness often found in Iranian architecture: brick, adobe, stone, high-thermal-mass mortars shaped by structural and climatic demands.
For me, thickness is not simply a material condition or tectonic density; it is the spatial capacity to contain multiple layers simultaneously without collapsing into a single image or diagram.
At “NextOffice”, we’ve explored this everywhere: thick ground at Sadra Civic center and Derang-gah villa, thick roofs at Safadasht Dual villa and Dehkadeh Villa, and thick walls at Inter-Pier project.
Kushk Villa takes this further, fusing hut diagrams with thick walls. Masonry arches along perpendicular axes carry a heavy sloped roof while defining space—creating service cores, private stone enclosures, and flowing public zones between domes. Form, structure, and organization merge into one diagram.
From there, déjà vu emerged as a key concept—sitting between nostalgia and historicist copying. It is a form of familiarity without a clearly identifiable origin: memory triggers but never fully lands. Not a return to history, but its suspension—half-recognized, half-alienated.
I see déjà vu as memory disruption. You’re in the “new,” but fragments keep pointing back—unclear if from lived experience, imagination, or something else. Unlike reconstruction, it sparks interpretation.
In Iranian architecture, you can’t erase the past or just continue it. Historical forms linger, destabilized. Déjà vu emerges precisely within that unstable gap between memory and estrangement, much like thickness itself: layers of time and space coexist, familiar yet estranged.

A.A.: When did you establish your own practice, and what were its initial objectives?

A.T.: My independent work started in the early 2000s, when the disconnect between university training and real construction became obvious—just as I was entering professional practice.
In 2008, Hamid Emami and I formally launched “Razan Office”, though we’d been collaborating informally since around 2004. We worked design and construction as parallel processes, fully intertwined.
Razan threw us into economic realities, timelines, materials, and all the players involved. That proximity shifted my view: architecture isn’t just problem-solving—it’s also about questioning, pausing, building narratives.
By 2009, after parting with “Razan Office”, I founded “Next Office”. From day one, it was more than a design studio—it was an intellectual workspace for testing, revising, failing, reflecting. Each project became both built work and a conceptual position.

A.A.: What does the name “Next” signify for your architectural office, and what conceptual position does it express?

A.T.: “Next” was never just a name—it’s a mindset. It holds deliberate ambiguity: familiar yet external, both “itself” and “something else,” always carrying excess beyond definition.
That simultaneity—holding this “and” that—is core to my architecture. It doesn’t resolve contradictions; it sustains them within one framework.
“Next” also keeps us restless. Nothing is allowed to become fully settled or self-assured. There’s built-in self-criticism: everything we make can be questioned, redefined, even taken apart. That tension between building and remaking keeps us passionately responsible and sharp.
Ultimately, it stands against habit, repetitive stereotypes and comfort. The slight dislocation, the unresolved state—that’s what keeps the practice alive and open-ended. 

 

A.A.: What notable awards or recognitions has the “NextOffice” received so far, and what do they reveal about its standing in the field?

A.T.: NextOffice projects have earned recognition through the Royal Academy London Awards, seven World Architecture Festival awards, plus exhibitions and publications highlighting our spatial, structural, and narrative focus.
For our team, awards aren’t about validation—they’re about continuity. They’re pauses, not endpoints, that sustain us and reopen dialogue.
In this sense, NextOffice operates as an “individual institution”: contingent, distributed, dependent on each person, bound by shared practice and personal persistence rather than “strict” hierarchy. In Iran, architecture grows from these small, unstable structures where architects juggle roles—designer, narrator, educator, memory-keeper.
What may appear externally as a persistent collective practice is simply the way architectural work survives and sustains itself here. 

 

A.A.: What role does teaching play in your professional practice, and how has it shaped your architectural thinking and knowledge production?

A.T.: For me, teaching has never been secondary to practice; the two have always been inseparable. Teaching, writing, and design form three intertwined dimensions of one intellectual trajectory, each sustaining the others.
I started teaching in the early 2000s, before my own office, to keep collective thinking alive and architectural questions active. It was never about knowledge transmission—it was shared inquiry from day one.
Writing has been equally essential. Without narration, architecture risks becoming mere consumption. Text, classroom, and projects are three fields tackling one concern: understanding the world and our position in it.
Teaching extends beyond the transmission of skills: critical thinking, contextual reading, sustained ambiguity. My role as educator isn’t to resolve questions but to keep them alive in discussion—especially vital in unstable contexts, where inquiry itself becomes practice.
That’s why I’ve always worked beyond universities—in workshops, informal gatherings, small experimental formats running parallel to formal academia.

 

A.A.: Could you elaborate on the concept of alchemy in architecture and explain how it has shaped your professional identity?

A.T.: Over time, I came to see design as a layered process: reading → narrative → transformation. In Duals Book, I outlined three roles—the detective, journalist, and alchemist—not as metaphors, but actual design phases.
The detective is one who suspends all assumptions and gathers fragments: clients’ unspoken demands, regulatory constraints and even silenced aspects of the project. The journalist organizes these extensive data, refines, and weaves them into narrative, framing key tensions. This is the addressing and positioning step towards the critical concerns of the project.
Alchemy is the transformative stage of the process. Analysis transforms into material form as oppositions begin to interact. Form, structure, program, narrative fuse into one integrated condition. It’s tension becoming space, contradiction becoming potential.
Duality, thickness, déjà vu are not formal tricks—they’re alchemy’s outcomes. Déjà vu activates collective memory to generate difference. Thickness allows multiple spatial and conceptual layers to coexist beyond purely climatic or structural concerns, by creating conditions of suspension and layered inhabitation, it introduces both spatial and conceptual depth into the project.
Our office identity lives at these three roles’ intersection: reading signs, building narrative, transforming thought into space. Alchemy isn’t magic—it’s patiently converting constraint into capacity, pushing architecture from reaction to reflection. 

 

A.A.: Could you outline the development and programs of the “Contemporary Iranian Architects Association,” and explain your role within it?

A.T.: The Association isn’t classical—it’s a response to absence: dialogue space, experience narration, collective memory where formal structures fall short.
Founded in 2014, I joined in 2015 and took direction in 2021. We work collectively, prioritizing shared value over individual gain. Our focus is architectural discourse through experimentation, documentation, visual inquiry—via Red Non-Competition, Hezartoo Magazine, courses, public programs. Young practitioners test ideas, make mistakes, explore marginal topics.
I remember, around 2001–2002, shortly after graduation, speaking wistfully with a friend about the absence of meaningful cultural production around us. I joked we could at least form a theater group. My friend replied, “Alireza it is ‘Too late”.
The past two decades—my office, this Association—have been attempts to realize that unresolved idea: spaces for collective experiment, shared error, sustained thinking.
It remains an “individual institution”: precarious, active, and sustained through memory, persistence, and collective effort rather than permanence-an “architecture of society” that persists without guarantees.As I wrote in Hezartoo #3: “In this Shahrzad-like continuity, Iranian practice is powerful yet fragile. With creativity and narration, you remain present in others’ reality. Lose them, and presence dissolves.”