Isfahan’s historic fabric has long suffered from careless urban policies. The southern grounds of Naqsh-e Jahan Square, once filled with houses and daily life, have been erased and replaced by vacant lands and improvised parking lots spaces without identity or dialogue. This “erasure” is not the result of natural disaster but of a gradual neglect of what it means to live within history.
“Miangah” approaches this condition not by reconstructing the past nor by flattening it for contemporary forms, but by positioning infill as a stance rather than a technique. The project inserts modular, semi-temporary steel structures into the wounded fabric forms that are contemporary and raw, yet non-destructive. These scaffolding-like frames act as flexible platforms, capable of adaptation, growth, or relocation, embodying a living and resilient architecture.
The project’s most iconic elements are the colored, horn-shaped tunnels. More than circulation devices, they are narrative structures passages from darkness into light, from oblivion into a renewed frame of the Shah Abbas dome. They embody architecture as time-travel: linking memory, present condition, and possible futures.
“Miangah” thus resists nostalgic reproduction as well as careless erasure, proposing instead a critical and contemporary dialogue with history an attempt to re-open possibilities within lost urban spaces.