Arch-SoHo
Building Living Ruins: Memory, Emergent Form, and Rural Futures in Neyshabur
Year: 2026-now
Location: Neyshabur, Khorasan Razavi, Iran
Keywords: rural futures, living ruins, earthen architecture, kāhgel / straw-clay construction, material culture, childhood sensorium, embodied memory, weathering and decay, maintanance and repair, more-than-human architecture, post-use architecture
1. The Photograph That Changed What I Thought I Remembered
I have been looking at an old photograph of my grandmother, taken sometime in the late 1980s in our village near Neyshabur. The camera is focused on her, so the background has gone soft, but you can still make out a rose garden and the earthen wall that was probably holding it in, and set into that wall two niches, one of them intact and the other partly fallen in.
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I found myself wondering why a garden wall would have niches at all, and how thick a wall has to be before it can carry them, and then remembering that some of them held tools and some held the big flower vases, which is beside the point I am trying to get to. What stopped me was the collapsed one.
I left Iran in 2010, and for years I had been carrying an assumption I never bothered to examine, which was that the rural buildings I grew up around had fallen apart during the sixteen years I was away, that I had left intact buildings behind and come back to their remains. The photograph is around thirty-five years old and the wall was already like that, and my grandmother is standing in front of it with a lovely smile, having her picture taken.
The background clearly did not strike her as ugly. It was not something to crop out. I also don't think she was looking at it the way a visitor might, as picturesque decay. It was simply there, part of the garden, part of the village, part of the ordinary look of the place.
And once I let go of that assumption, other things came back. These buildings did not become ruins after I left. Many of them had always been in a condition I would now, from here, call ruin, and yet they were not abandoned in any sense I would recognize now. People lived with them, animals lived in them, plants came up through them, and they were weathered and patched and altered and used and partly collapsed all at the same time, without any of those states cancelling the others.
When I squint into that memory, the houses, the stables, the animal troughs, the ovens, the garden walls, the qanats, and the old bathhouse start blending into one earthen landscape. A house could look cracked and eroded from outside, close to half-ruined, while inside there were plastered walls, a place to sleep, a place to eat, and a family living there.
2. Temporality, Labor, and a Generative Building Paradigm
The architecture I spent my weekends and summers around was part of a much larger culture of working the land, and it is hard to separate the two.
The fields were watered through small earthen channels running between the wheat, the barley, the alfalfa, and whatever else was in the ground that year. There were men we called abgir, doing something close to the work of a mirab, an irrigator. They knew how to move water across a field. With a shovel they would close one path and open another and send the water down a different set of furrows.
The same shovel was also used to make architecture.
The summers were hot and the sun could be punishing, so the abgir would put up a small shelter for himself out in the field. He would take wet earth from beside the channel, level a patch of ground, and then assemble wood, brush, straw, and whatever else was lying close by into something just big enough to crawl under. He ate there and rested there and drank water and made tea, and even when nobody was around you could read the traces, the ash, the charcoal, the darkened patch where the fire had been. The shelter belonged to the work of irrigation about as much as the channel did.
I remember lying under one of these as a boy. They were so small that my feet stuck out into the sun. I would lie on my back looking up at the low angled ceiling, where small points of light came through the gaps between the branches and the pieces of wood, and I would shift my head a little so I could keep the light glittering without letting it drop straight into my eyes. Outside, the wheat and barley stretched out in deep yellow and gold complementing an even blue sky without a single patch of cloud, and when the breeze moved through the grain there was a steady hiss, which was the sound of the seeds trembling inside their husks.
When the irrigating was done, the shelters came apart. They appeared with the work, lived a while, and went. The mud went back into the channel. The wood and brush were broken down with the shovel and carried off by the water toward the far end of the field. It was almost as though the building had been borrowed from the landscape and then handed back.
Thinking about them now, those temporary shelters and the more permanent village fabric seem to me to belong to the same way of building. I have started saying builtscape for the village, because it sat somewhere between building and landscape and I have not found a better word. Villagers squatted in the shade of a wall beside the main road, the busiest part of the village, their backs against it as they smoked together. The same walls housed horses, cows, sheep, and donkeys, stored tools, held gardens in, carried ovens, and propped up the day's work.
They were made of earth and straw. In the larger ones, the houses, wooden beams carried the roof, with boards or smaller pieces of wood spanning between them, straw laid over that, and then mud or straw-clay covering the whole thing. The small field shelters used the same intelligence in a lighter and shorter-lived form. I remember the mud being made, too. Earth dug out, water and straw added, and then people rolling up their trouser legs and stepping in barefoot to knead it until it turned workable, and when they pulled a foot out it came with a big kissing sound.
3. A more-than-human builtscape
There was one dry qanat we used to climb down into. Drought had opened cavities and odd pockets around it. One of the village dogs had gone into one of these and given birth to eight or nine puppies, and we would climb down to bring them food and milk.
A few meters away, inside the same qanat, was the village garbage dump, and I can still remember the sharpness of the smell. The side with the garbage caught the hot sun, which helped dry it out, while the shaded side had a cave-like opening where the dog and her puppies stayed. The garbage end was wide and exposed; the long way down to the puppies was cool and narrow and tight. Climbing down into the qanat was easy enough. Crawling through that hole was the real test.
The same form was a playground, a place for adventure and imagined treasure, a maternity ward for an animal, and a dump.
Something similar was true of the walls. The half-eroded garden walls were our favorite things to climb, since their cavities gave us footholds and handholds, and we could pull ourselves up, sit on top, and slide back down. Touching them was close to touching the dusty back of a cow or a horse. I can't picture doing any of that on an industrial brick or a concrete-block wall, where the material is hard and abrasive and cuts your hands and knees and tears your clothes.
The earthen wall behaved differently. Powdery soil gathered on its surface and at its base, sometimes almost as fine as flour, and that dust sat between the building and our bodies like a cushion. What my memory holds is that those walls were soft, and that they did not strike back, and I have come to think of them as generous, which is a word I am aware is doing a lot of work here.
Even the loose soil at the base of the wall had its residents. Insects buried themselves in it and left little funnel-shaped craters until the ground looked like the surface of the moon. Birds laid eggs in holes in the walls, and lizards lived and laid there too. In spring, plants came out of the buildings, hoopoes nested in the cavities, wildflowers turned up, and the roof of the old bathhouse grew delicate poppies. Later in the year the whole thing dried out into one camel-colored velvet of earth and dead grass and wall and field.
Inside the old bathhouse, the khazineh stayed strangely cold and wet even though nobody had bathed there in decades. The floor was muddy enough that our footprints stayed in it. I still don't know where that moisture was coming from. There was a dried frog in there as well, which was evidence that some other kind of life had been using the space.
4. The Body Remembers Things the Ruin Cannot Tell Me
The cold of the bathhouse, the softness of the wall, the smell in the qanat, the foothold made by a cavity, the shaded spot where somebody could lean and smoke, the hole that turned into a nest: these are formal and material and spatial and social capacities of the architecture, and more-than-human ones as well. Some of them cannot be recovered from what is standing today.
This is why childhood sensorium and somatic memory are doing real work in this research rather than sitting decoratively beside it. The surviving structure is one archive and my body is another. A wall can be measured and photographed now, but the wall will not tell me that a child once found it soft enough to slide down. A section drawing will not tell me how cold the bathhouse was, or what the qanat smelled like, or how the light flickered through the roof of the abgir's shelter. What the surviving object can do is correct my memory, and what memory can do is ask questions of the object that would not otherwise have occurred to me.
I do not treat memory as definitive evidence. I misremember, and I know that some of what I have described above has been smoothed over thirty years by the current of other memories. So the work has to move between material documentation, local accounts, and memory, letting each one test and complicate the others.
7. Once the meaning went, the maintenance stopped
It was customary, and in some villages it still is, to repair these structures as they weathered. If rain opened a crack, someone filled it with mud. If part of a roof or a wall went, another layer of mud was rubbed over it. The material that made the building could also heal it immediately, which is a property I have never stopped finding remarkable.
There was a reciprocity in that. The house gave shade and shelter and warmth and home, and people gave care back to it. I sometimes think of it as being a little like a domestic animal, in that it lived with you as long as you paid attention to it, and if you stopped, it did not die all at once. It softened and settled and went back to the ground slowly enough that you could change your mind.
Which brings me back to the photograph, and to what it did to my understanding of abandonment. These buildings were not abandoned because they had started to look like ruins. They had looked weathered for generations, and no one seemed to mind. Thirty years ago, I remember villagers in their nineties living alongside these same structures. Abandonment began when their meaning changed.
Seen across roughly twenty years of Google Earth imagery, steel, corrugated metal, concrete block, and industrial brick have come to signify what is new, clean, efficient, and modern in the countryside. Television, changing language, economic aspiration, and disappearing local construction knowledge all fed a different sense of what a proper building ought to look like. Once one or two new houses or cattle sheds went up, they spread fast, the way a virus does, and each new building changed the meaning of the old one standing next to it.
The earthen wall that had simply been normal became cracked. The weathered house became old. What had been part of the plain reality of the village became dirty, cumbersome, ugly, obsolete. And once the meaning went, the maintenance stopped, and once the maintenance stopped, people left the living ruin to more-than-human life while it lay down and became ground again.
8. Kind ruins and dangerous ruins
Our main home during the school year was not in Neyshabur. We spent summers and weekends there, and the rest of the time we lived in Mashhad, a city of about three million. Directly across the street from us was an unfinished four-story building, steel columns and brick infill. The owner seemed to have run out of money and simply walked away, leaving piles of sand and lime and wheelbarrows and buckets around it. It stayed like that for years.
That building never felt like the ruins in the village. It felt like a spaceship from another world had crash-landed in our alley. It announced its own abandonment, and it felt dangerous and possibly haunted. The adults warned us off it.
The way I have come to see it, what has happened across much of the countryside around Neyshabur is not well described as the new replacing the old. Something dead and dangerous has taken the place of an everyday builtscape, something sharp has taken the place of something soft, and something foreign to the landscape has taken the place of something that came out of it.
An earthen structure can host animals and vegetation, take repair, change use, erode, and eventually return to the soil. A lot of the newer industrial construction stays hard and abrasive for as long as it exists, and when it is abandoned it tends to stay sharp and empty and dangerous, and its materials came from elsewhere and had to be trucked in and carry a different environmental cost on the way.
9. Not all of it is intelligence
I don't want to correct one mistake by making its opposite, which would be to romanticize anything that is old and made of earth.
Some of these ruins may look the way they do simply because they were poorly built. A wall may have been hit by a vehicle or knocked down in a dispute. Some of what I am describing belonged to poverty and scarcity and hardship.
That is part of why the study needs many living ruins rather than one beautiful one. Zooming out across houses, garden walls, animal spaces, ovens, qanats, and roofs, it becomes possible to look for conditions that recur rather than damage that happened once: softened edges, partial enclosures, cavities, exposed sections, shaded pockets, thick walls, inhabited roofs, forms settling into the ground. Those can be studied as functional conditions, and they can also be studied as aesthetic ones.
10. Aesthetics Determines What Is Allowed to Have a Future
I don't want to shy away from the aesthetic argument.
My grandmother's photograph shows that those forms did not belong to a category called “ruin.” She was not posing proudly in front of picturesque decay, and she was not ignoring the wall either. It was part of the ordinary visual reality of rural life. Whatever beauty it had, if that is the word, was tied to material reality, to how things were built, to the climate, to the farming year, and to plain use.
Once a form is culturally understood as ugly, obsolete, or failed, people stop caring for it and stop making more of it.
Architecture can actually intervene in that meaning. It can excavate the aesthetic language already present in these structures and giving it some contemporary legitimacy, so that there is something to set against the standardized industrial building spreading across the countryside.
I should say clearly that I don't mean the polished earthen ecolodges around Kashan, Isfahan, or Yazd. Taking vernacular architecture, cleaning it up, and turning it into a tourism aesthetic is a different project and, I think, a smaller one. What I am interested in is the ordinary architecture of farmers and rural workers, the houses and walls and stables and ovens and shade structures and animal spaces, the buildings people actually worked with and touched and repaired and climbed on and leaned against and lived among.
11. Beginning from the end
What I want to do is examine the current state of these living ruins, a state we would conventionally read as the end of a building's life, and treat it instead as a starting condition, formally, materially, spatially, and in terms of both human and more-than-human use, for the future of rural architecture.
At the scale of one wall, the state it is in may well be accidental. But when many examples are mapped and compared, the forms that keep recurring may tell us something about what happens to architecture that has lived for decades under rain, drought, sun, vegetation, animals, human use, repair, and neglect. Those recurring end states can be studied as something close to optimum conditions because the forms carry a long record of pressure and life and adaptation that no new building has yet been subjected to.
From there they can become formal starting points for design. Technology may help test this, since a new building can be modeled and then put through simulated rain, drought, solar exposure, erosion, vegetation, use, and maintenance, and we can watch where it goes.
I am not looking for new buildings made to look old, which would be a costume. What I want to understand is whether a rural building can begin from a state that is already settled in its weathering, repair, appropriation, multiple uses, and coexistence with everything that will move into it. Which is to say, whether we can build a living ruin from the start.
5. Qanbar Had a House
I recently sent an early version of this project to my cousin Hussein. He is only a year younger than me, and many of these memories are his memories too. We spent those years together in the village, climbed into the same qanat, wandered through the same structures, and went into the old bathhouse together. Talking to him brought back a part of the bathhouse that I had left out.
There was already a world of stories around old hammams. We had heard stories about jinn appearing in them, especially early in the morning, around that strange time between darkness and daylight. We carried some of those stories into the abandoned hammam with us.
Hussein remembers that going into it felt like entering a space somewhere between two worlds. Outside was ordinary life. Somewhere else was the invisible world of jinn and stories we had heard but could not see. The hammam seemed to sit between them.
A lot of that was physical. We went down rather than in. The temperature changed. The light changed. There were shadows, strange proportions, cold and dampness. The distance between the ordinary world and the imaginary one was somehow reinforced by the body.
Behind the khazineh was another square space reached by going down a few steps. I learned much later from my mother that it was called the golkhond (گلخند), and that it was associated with the fire that heated the bath. Hussein and I knew none of that. To us it looked enough like a house to suggest that somebody had lived there, but once inside, it made no sense as one. There was no kitchen, no bathroom, no bed, no shelf, not even a niche. There was nothing that explained how anyone could have lived in this strange square room. So we made an explanation.We called it Qanbar's house.
Qanbar was a character in stories we made up ourselves. He had died there, or his spirit remained there, or perhaps he was some kind of jinn. I don't remember us needing to settle that question. What mattered was that Qanbar belonged to that room. We could not understand the golkhond. It looked enough like one thing to raise a question and not enough like it to provide an answer. Into that gap went Qanbar.
Hussein said something recently that I keep thinking about: Qanbar exists in the West too, but there he is homeless. Ghosts, spirits, monsters, myths and invented beings are everywhere. But ours had been given a physical environment. he had an address.
6. Many Worlds Within Walking Distance
Hussein also reminded me of the greenhouses. The wooden house we stayed in at the village had three floors. On the second floor my father had made a greenhouse facing south. I remember opening the door in winter and immediately feeling the warmth and humidity on my face, along with the smell of geraniums and other flowers. You crossed a door and the climate changed.
Many of those plants were raised somewhere else on the property, in another greenhouse, a nursery, that was partly below ground and covered with plastic. Its stairs were rough and broken. You went down, opened the door, and again found yourself suddenly surrounded by warmth, humidity and plants.
Hussein described the larger environment as a collection of these small worlds. You could go toward the animals and enter the world of the stable. You could go down into the qanat. You could descend into the bathhouse. You could climb a wall or drop down a broken stair. In winter you could walk into warmth. In summer you could find coolness below ground. Within a relatively small area there were different temperatures, different levels of humidity, different smells, different kinds of light, different plants and animals, different ways of moving, and different stories attached to different places.
Hussein compared this with the way we now use virtual reality to transport ourselves from one environment to another. Put on a headset and suddenly you are somewhere else.
We had something strangely like that, except that the environments were physical. The temperature really changed. The plants were alive. The animal was there. The ground became wet or dusty. Your body had to climb or crouch or descend. Your eyes adjusted to the darkness. Each small journey changed not only what you saw but the conditions around your body.
And Hussein connected this back to something I had already been struggling to name in these structures: their generosity. Perhaps generous does not only mean that an earthen wall was soft enough for a child to climb, or that its cavities could become nests, or that vegetation could grow through it. This architecture, or perhaps this way of building, was generous enough to hold many things at once: different microclimates, different species, different kinds of movement, work, childhood play, memory and stories.
It was even generous enough to host Qanbar.
I am beginning to wonder whether this is another quality worth looking for in a living ruin: enough spatial, material and imaginative looseness to accommodate lives and meanings its builder could not have predicted.
