1946, the first volume of an Iranian architecture magazine was published under the title Architect. During the three following decades before the 1979 revolution, three other titles (Building Bank, Modern Architecture, and Art & Architecture) provided the field with modern architectural keywords. The revolution stopped the modern system of Iranian architectural writing until the government prepared a plan for discursive control over text production in every field. In 1984, the Ministry of Housing accepted a proposal for founding the Research Center for Urban and Architecture Studies. Funded by the state, the center hosted lectures and conducted various urban and architectural research projects, all resulting in Abadi magazine with a diverse discourse on architecture. After publishing the magazine for six years (1991-1996), the editorial board of Abadi decided to leave the state-funded system to found a privately-funded magazine (Memar) for providing the Iranian audience with a pure language of architecture and a limited discourse that is focused only on architectural matters. By situating this process of meaning production in the political "discursive field" surrounding it, the present research attempts to clarify different discursive strategies employed in these magazines for articulating the meaning of architecture in Iran. After that, it can be indicated how deeply the meaning of architecture is dependent on text production and how important it is to analyze the discursive battle over the ever-changing meaning of architecture in different contexts.

Sina Zarei MSc. Arch. Beheshti University, Iran
since 2019