Rojia Forouhar Abadeh

Rojia Forouhar is an architect, researcher and educator based in Tehran/Iran. She graduated from the AA (Architectural Association School of Architecture), London/United Kingdom and holds the AA diploma and Master’s degree in History, Theory and Critical Thinking.

Interdisciplinary projects are one of her passions, and she has collaborated with architects, filmmakers, artists and writers internationally. In her work, collective projects act as both an approach to and an end product of her research. She uses a combination of space, text, film and architectural drawings to refer to urban discourses through spatial fantasies.

Invisible Tehran(s), exhibited at the Contemporary Architects Association, Tehran (2016), draws on the experience of Nasir’s poetic texts, Calvino’s text and situationist practice in resisting the simplistic recording of space solely by images. Public Storage, installed at Afif-Abad Garden, Shiraz/Iran (2017), explores the finished state of architecture, and that which makes an unfinished building different from its ruins. Tehran Interior Sequences, exhibited at Platform 28, Tehran (2019), studies Iranian cinema as an accidental archive of architecture to explore domestic spaces in Tehran. Lost Gardens, exhibited at National Geography, Tehran (2019), documents a contemporary urban phenomenon and its narratives, including the disappearance of five green spaces in Tehran. The Building of a Story, The Story of a Building, exhibited at Platform 28, Tehran (2020), explores how literature alters architecture into a literary substance and that which is gained and/or lost in the process.

Selected titles of her lectures and essays include The City as Inspiration to the Artist; Against Nostalgia; Above the Parapet; The Role of Women in Architecture in Iran; A Tradition in Concrete and Form is All We Have.