Abstract:
The Tehran bazaar has been conceptualised as a linear-structured marketplace and as a united sociocultural entity consisting of several public buildings that vary in form, function and historical value. Built in the sixteenth century, it was affected by several urban plans in the twentieth century under Qajar, Pahlavi and the Islamic governments. Today it is known as a fixed, central, urban district demarcated by distinguishable linear north–south and east–west streets. The existing scholarship on the architectural history of the Tehran bazaar treats this Iranian marketplace as an immobile complex of static places. Such stability first ignores the constant transformation of the bazaar. Second, when architectural accounts tend to include the mobility of this urban environment, they borrow the grand sociopolitical narratives. The major problem, thus, remains the reduction of space to a backdrop of activities. By considering architecture as an active rather than a passive concept, this article aims to narrate a micro-analysis account, in order to consider architecture as an event. Mapping the problems of the conventional historiography, a Foucauldian concept of event is introduced, through which the micro-analysis of a place can be explored. This text employs two concrete examples of “strike” and “decline” to ask: what if a strike was a singular eventual statement, rather than another similar demonstration? And what if the decline was an architectural concept, rather than an ideological notion? To answer these two questions, the paper is divided into two major parts. The first part concerns the normalisation of various uprisings of the Tehran bazaar in the twentieth century and explores the micro performance of blind shutters during the strike. The second part interrogates the representation of the bazaar as an environment in crisis. Through Barthes' conception of punctum, the second part investigates how several framed photographs of the dead hung in various shops deploy death to prolong the life of the bazaar.