Megastructure Reloaded: A New Technocratic Approach to Housing Development in Ekbatan, Tehran

Under the USA’s free-market foreign policy in the 1960s and 1970s, the Tehran Redevelopment Company (TRC) in collaboration with a New York firm, Starrett Housing Corporation, undertook one of the most extensive and innovative Middle Eastern public housing projects.* As part of Tehran’s masterplan designed by the Austrian-American urban planner Victor Gruen – aided by Iranian architect Abdolaziz Farmanfarmaian – the scheme accommodated 15,500 low- and middle-income families, especially those of civil servants, in an area that became known as 'Shahrak-e Ekbatan' (Ekbatan). On one hand, the development aimed to change the everyday life of middle-class people; on the other, it sought to institute a capitalist economy with a bias towards rapid industrialisation. To achieve these objectives, the TRC asked Gruzen and Partners (USA) and Space Group (South Korea) to create a prototypical model: they selected the strongly collective urban form of a Brutalist concrete megastructure. Noting the influence of US President Jack Kennedy’s doctrine for developing countries during the Cold War, this article reveals how the Ektaban scheme addressed local culture and society, while also accommodating change over time. As a Middle Eastern Modernist megastructure, it was erected after Reyner Banham in 1973 had declared that typology ‘dead’ in the Western world.