Scale as a Political Strategy from Shahestan Pahlavi to the Great Mosalla of Tehran
2025 – Rome – Italy
This paper explores how architectural scale operates not merely as a spatial or aesthetic parameter, but as a strategic political technology—one that materializes sovereignty, organizes collective experience, and communicates ideological authority. Focusing on two monumental urban projects planned for the same central site in Tehran under consecutive Iranian regimes, the paper reveals how scale was rhetorically and materially mobilized to express radically different national visions and assert regime legitimacy.
The first project, Shahestan Pahlavi (“City of the Shah”), was conceived in the 1970s under Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as a grand urban development intended to centralize state functions, symbolize Iran’s modernizing ambitions, and position Tehran as a global capital. Initially envisioned through a collaboration with Louis Kahn and later developed by Llewelyn-Davies, the project featured Shah Nation Square, a vast public plaza designed to eclipse Isfahan’s historic Meydan-e-Shah. Its monumental scale signaled technocratic rationality, cultural sophistication, and geopolitical ambition, linking architectural size to aspirations of centralized authority and international prestige.
Following the 1979 Revolution, however, Shahestan was abandoned by the Islamic Republic, which denounced it as a symbol of monarchical excess and Western decadence. In its place, the regime initiated the Great Mosalla of Tehran in 1988, deliberately reclaiming the same site to articulate a new vision of sovereignty grounded in revolutionary ideology and religious symbolism. Still partially under construction, the Mosalla was designed as a monumental venue for collective Friday prayers, political ceremonies, and mass ideological performances. Its spatial language—dominated by a 72-meter iwan and a 63-meter dome—translates Shi‘i history and revolutionary devotion into built form. Unlike Shahestan’s outward-facing modernism, the Mosalla’s scale turns inward, rooting national identity in collective ritual and sacred memory.
This spatial juxtaposition illustrates how scale becomes a contested discursive tool, deployed differently by competing regimes to remake the city, structure visibility, and mediate citizen-state relations. While Shahestan projected sovereignty through global alignment and administrative order, the Mosalla reterritorialized it through religious symbolism and ritual centrality. In both cases, scale is used not only to structure space, but to legitimize power, define inclusion and exclusion, and reshape urban imaginaries.
Theoretically, the paper engages with debates on scale in architecture and urban theory, from Alberti’s analogy between house and city to recent scholarship on spatial politics and ideological representation. It draws particularly on Henri Lefebvre’s concept of the social production of space and on discourse theory (Laclau and Mouffe), employing tools such as nodal points, chains of equivalence, and floating signifiers to analyze how scale functions within political discourse.
Based on original planning reports, architectural visualizations, and archival materials from the Iranian National Archives, this study offers a new account of how large-scale architectural interventions operate as technologies of political imagination and control. It argues that architectural scale is not neutral or universal, but historically contingent and ideologically charged—a language through which states construct legitimacy, perform identity, and claim continuity across ruptures in governance. By examining Tehran’s transformation through these two emblematic projects, the paper contributes to a deeper understanding of how architecture participates in shaping political authority, collective memory, and national belonging.