The Zayandeh-rud
River Basin

NADAAA’s contribution to the 2021 Venice Biennale di Architettura’s Future Assembly exhibition is an animation on The Zayandeh-rud River Basin. The Zayandeh-rud river basin in central Iran is a critical hydrological conduit that overcomes the commonly held divide between rural and urban cultures. In an arid region where water is “the” critical resource, it serves agricultural lands as much as it gave birth to the city of Isfahan as we know it. Beyond the Seljuk Period, the Safavid dynasty extended the City of Isfahan southward, building Sio-se-pol, Pole Khaju, and the Marnan bridges, all of which not only connected to agricultural lands beyond but became public destinations in their own right. In 1972, in the name of progress, the Shah Abbas Dam recalibrated its water flow leading to the “dehydration” of the very river that gave life to this historic city. These viaducts have been left to whither in this new landscape, having lost the very waters that once gave them a reason to bridge. Arguably the most classic of Iranian cities, Isfahan is characterized by Naqsh-e Jahan Square, one of the world’s largest plazas. However, beyond this public space, there is the organic path of the Bazaar to the north which is the focus of this animation speculating on the connection between the topographic conditions of the site and the historic watershed of the river at large around which human occupation occurred. Further to this, the camera’s eye follows the extensive green-scape, the Chahar Bagh to the south, which connects the large Maidan to the Zayandeh-rud only to reveal the now desolate and barren landscape of a deserted river bed. As epilogue, the Sio-se-pol offers an image of restrained optimism, at once in awe of its architectural majesty as well as its impending vulnerability. The animation draws on the Beaux-Arts tradition of the Analytique, a composite representational technique, which here has been critically reinterpreted in the seamless kinetic montage sequences that synthesize divergent representational methods including the photographic, the planimetric, and the perspectival towards a shared narrative.