Mani Farhadi, who is now three decades into her career, shared some key milestones in design programming and planning for learning environments. Mani reflected on the beginnings of her passion, which actually started in school. Mani loved school, particularly Iranzamin, where she grew up in Iran. "Iranzamin" means "Land of Iran," and this school was co-educational, taught entirely in English, and followed the International Baccalaureate curriculum. Many of the teachers were foreign, and the school included students of various minority religions such as Jewish, Bahai, Zoroastrian, Christian, and the children of diplomats, creating a diverse environment that felt like a mini United Nations. This inclusive and stimulating environment during K-12 education had a profound impact on Mani and inspired a desire to be involved in learning environments.

This past year, I personally experienced a transformation, moving away from being a burnt-out person, I learned how to incorporate more balance. With the help of professional coaches, yoga instructors, medical team, reading material, diversity training, friendship circle, and immediate family, I overcame. I’m defining my formula for life harmony; identifying the elements to include with INTENTION in my life that keep me balanced:

On the 3rd anniversary of our beloved mom’s passing (October 18, 2023), we remember and honor Laleh Bakhtiar. Mom was our “go to” for questions about life & death, good & evil, religion & spirituality. A loving mother of three (Mani Ardalan Farhadi, Iran Davar Ardalan and Karim Ardalan) and devoted grandmother of eight (Saied, Samira, Rodd, Aman, Amir, Ryon, Ryan, and Layla), she was our family’s matriarch. More than that, she was a uniter of souls.

As a part of Women's History Month, we wanted to highlight on the Iranian women of our chapter who have recently been celebrating Nowruz, Persian New Year, which marks the 1st day of Spring. We greatly appreciate Mani Farhadi who has put together some information below about the holiday and it's significance to many throughout the world. We are grateful to celebrate Nowruz this year with these Iranian women who actively participate in our Silicon Valley chapter: Our WIA Chair Sherry Sajadpour, our Social Media Leads Mani Farhadi and Sepi Amin, and our Design Awards logo designer Shadi Sinclair!

Lastly, we give a shoutout to the women of Iran fighting bravely against tyranny and oppression of the government, with nothing but courage and conviction.

Architecture is a field often associated with a linear and traditional career path - earning your degree, working your way up the ranks in a firm, and eventually becoming a licensed architect. However, as the industry evolves, architects are realizing that the path to success is not always a straight line. The Women in Architecture Committee (WIA) recently hosted a panel of women who shared their winding career paths and the lessons they learned along the way.

On Saturday, October 29th, the day of “Cyrus the Great" I was wondering about the irony of this legend. He was the visionary leader who established the FIRST, yes, the first Declaration of Human Rights in the world more than 2,500 years ago in Iran. He practiced tolerance of religion for all faiths within the Persian empire and wrote the first International Charter of Human Rights. One of his popular quotes: " Success should always call for showing greater kindness, generosity, and justice; only people lost in the darkness treat it as an occasion for greater greed." - Cyrus the Great 600–530 BC

Yet in the 21st century in the same land, Iranian women and girls are fighting for their rights, something as basic as the right to decide what to wear or not to wear! It seems unfathomable to some of us that not covering your hair is a crime. Even worse, there's an organization named Morality Police whose only charge is to control women and how they dress; women are even penalized for dancing, singing, writing, and so on and so forth…

June 3rd 2022 will live on in my mind as the day I was rescued from my chaotic and overly critical thought patterns regarding my performance as a professional in architecture and comforted with the warm feeling of being understood and accepted.

The event was held at the San Jose Women’s Club, a California Revival Style-building on the National Register of Historic Places, which is so beautiful it took my breath away. I could hardly take my eyes off its striking tiled features. Acknowledging friends and colleagues while enjoying the beautiful banquet as the evening began set the mood for the exciting experience to follow, yet I never expected the influence the speeches would have on me!

Sara Khorshidifard's research activities have entailed a triad trajectory in Urban-Rural Interface Studies, Tehran Studies, and Architectural Education, producing scholarship under the three outcome categories of Design Scholarship, Scholarship of Engagement, and Scholarship of Pedagogy.

Have you considered designing your life, the way you would design your space or your projects? What if you created your own path, your own recipe, your own mosaic? There’s no reason you can’t. You ARE a designer after all, are you not? Some examples from my story illustrate how you might produce your life to include the elements you want, to result in the outcomes you’d like, in a way that integrates your whole self.

Design your life to incorporate the way you’d like it to flow.

Aligned with broader trends in reenvisioning cities and their social spaces, the Springfield community is leaning into the idea of placemaking to boost its civic and economic prospects. There are various uses for the term and various types of placemaking efforts, but as we’ve come to think about it locally, we could define it as using planning and design principles to create quality places where people want to live, work and play.

In practical terms, placemaking is not so easy to explain. It’s a broad term that describes a process which by definition will look and feel different in every community. Its purpose also will look a little different depending on one’s role or point of view.

To city officials, it might be about expanding the tax base with new growth. To business and economic stakeholders, it might be about talent attraction and retention. To planners, it could represent the way the pieces fit together on a map. To designers or academics, it can represent loftier aspirational goals.

As a result, the concept can get a bit diluted when it’s put into practice. At worst, it becomes more of an exercise in “placemarketing” rather than placemaking. We lose the very idea of the place if we reduce it to a marketing exercise with an eye toward financial benefit.

That’s why it’s vital for any placemaking effort to include the voices of a very important group: the residents and patrons of the community. From the standpoint of the resident, placemaking is about cultivating a sense of belonging – it’s about a feeling. How can we cultivate emotions and feelings so we can bolster our sense of place and belonging?

There are some helpful concepts to do this, and they don’t always have to do with traditional design.

The first is diversity and inclusion. Diversity should be at the center of this conversation because not everyone has the same way of gaining those feelings and a sense of belonging. We are all different, and we have different desires and needs. How can we make places that are memorable for everyone and have real meaning and connection to their lives? That’s a big challenge.

For example, if we’re painting a mural, the content of that mural becomes important. Who are we representing in the mural? Who might we be excluding?

Age is an important variable in diversity when it comes to placemaking, too. Oftentimes placemaking efforts tend to center on the downtown spaces or venues that typically cater to young adults. But children, families and retirees all want to belong, too.

This illustrates the importance of another key concept: careful listening. This may come as a dilemma for designers. Sometimes, deeper and lengthier periods of understanding about the place and its existing assets need to take place without any immediate act of design. We need to slow down this initial stage of the process, stretch the learning and listening phase, and then engage the design phase to express what has been learned.

No community has unlimited resources, and therefore design decisions must not take place in a vacuum. There is tremendous benefit in beginning with existing assets in the community, and taking advantage by harnessing current capacities and potentials of places. Striving to become catalytic, each step should be considered in terms of how it might spur other changes that community members have said they want to see or strengthen existing aspects they value.

Only after we’ve gone through these steps can we consider the aesthetics of physical design. Done well, the design of our built environment can be used to represent our spaces and places justly, rightfully and inclusively.

The idea of a perfect place for everyone is dreamy and ambitious, but why shouldn’t we aspire to the ideal of place everyone feels good in or wants to go to? That’s powerful and inspiring.

The storytelling will take care of itself from that point. Marketing is best when it has an authentic story to tell. If we get the placemaking right, then the good feelings and great stories will naturally lead to catalytic change that boost everyone’s prospects.

Shahed Saleem’s book The British Mosque explores the ingenuity and adaptability of Muslim immigrant communities through a wide-ranging survey of mosque architecture in British cities and towns since the late nineteenth century. Published by Historic England, Saleem’s expansive and richly illustrated account draws upon patterns of Muslim cultural assimilation in the West in order to add to our knowledge of diasporic mosque-building processes. For Saleem, mosques helped create pluralistic and multicultural spaces for Muslims within British society. Tracing the diversity of British mosque buildings, he shows how Western mosques are inspired by the symbolism of their Eastern “classical” peers, while they also challenge the status quo prevailing in Muslim countries.

Saleem examines thirty-four key examples built between 1889 and 2018 in eighteen British cities and towns. These case studies come from a database of 1,500 mosques (MuslimsInBritain.org), showing a mix of three types: house mosques (45 percent), conversions (39 percent), and purpose built (16 percent). From humble vernacular community mosques constructed in modest homes to recent landmark constructions—such as the proposed Salaam Centre in the suburb of North Harrow—the case studies explore the nuanced cultural processes through which Muslim immigrants of different ethnic backgrounds built mosques.

Chapter 1 lays out the main themes and research methodology, sketching a broad history of mosque architecture and religious ritual. The author then builds a case for the British mosque as a physical form and social organization that empowers Muslim religious institutions to act as focal points for community development. Saleem covers mosque management, ownership, and leadership, as well as describing organizational structures and charity missions.  As the book’s subtitle suggests, Saleem understands mosque architecture as part of social history: key parameters in creating early self-contained British Muslim communities included kinship support and shared linguistic, cultural, and religious traditions.

Chapter 2 maps the change from house mosques in the late nineteenth century to the first purpose-built structures. Saleem shows how early mosques in domestic spaces, in which informal spaces of worship maintained a residential character, emerged as social institutions and places of practical support and cultural comfort. Muslims in Britain lived in distinct neighborhoods based on country of origin and built mosques that reflected their ethnic differences. Chapter 3, continuing into the 1960s, looks at the labor migrations of Muslim families. This generation found house mosques too small and began to convert into mosques non-domestic buildings such as churches, community halls, cinemas, retail premises, and schools. Conversions, more than house mosques, included external symbolic features identifying them as Muslim spaces.

Chapters 4 to 8 describe the surge in new-built projects from the 1970s to the end of the century. The landmark mosques of the 1970s and 1980s—both built and unbuilt—illustrate the emergence of a distinct Muslim architectural identity in Britain. Purpose-built mosques of this period used references both to international Muslim architecture and to local vernacular styles. In the twenty-first century—partly due to 9/11 and its impact on Muslim life—mosques become an instrument of discourse that required them to appear historical. More recently, a new generation of mosques, such as the Shahporan Masjid and Islamic Centre by Saleem’s East-London-based practice Makespace Architects, represents a more diverse and vibrant British Muslim culture. Chapter 8 underscores how British mosques evolved organically through iterative, collaborative, and fragmentary processes. The chapter concentrates on how purpose-built mosques replicate historic styles of Islamic architecture.

There are still very few studies of mosques in Western countries. Saleem’s book fits into the spectrum of single-country mosque books, such as Sun Dazhang and Qiu Yulan’s Islamic Buildings: The Architecture of Islamic Mosques in China (2015), Akel Ismail Kahera’s Deconstructing the American Mosque (2010), and Jerrilynn Denise Dodds and Edward Grazda’s New York Masjid (2002). Like Saleem’s book, Renata Holod, Hasan-Uddin Khan, and Kimberly Mims’ The Mosque and the Modern World (1997) considers cases across borders and cultures, few of them overlapping with those found in The British Mosque. Robert Hillenbrand’s Islamic Architecture (1994), often used as a textbook, and Kishvar Rizvi’s (2015) The Transnational Mosque, are relevant to Saleem’s approach, yet unfortunately they are missing from his bibliography. Rizvi’s book in particular could help clarify the contrast between British mosques, designed to embody bottom-up, democratic symbolism, and transnational mosques in Muslim countries, designed to embody the political ideologies of the regimes that build them. One such transnational example is the avant-garde Vali-e-Asr Mosque in the Iranian capital Tehran by Fluid Motion Architects’ Reza Daneshmir and Catherine Spiridonoff—a progressive scheme that has provoked heated criticism from historicists and conservatives.

Saleem argues that beyond their formal qualities and religious purposes, mosques serve important cultural and symbolic functions. When Saleem is critical of mosque architecture, he criticizes formal qualities, alleging pastiche, stylistic indeterminacy, lack of sophistication, and outright failure of imagination. Yet such idiosyncratic formal expressions are valuable. The varied domes, minarets, and mihrabs create landscapes imbued with cultural differences and communal preferences. The formal critique is also disappointing because it leads away from discussions of social life. The book would be stronger if it directly addressed more controversial books, such as Thilo Sarrazin’s Deutschland schafft sich ab (Germany is Destroying Itself; 2010), which openly denounces Muslim immigration as a threat to German national identity and characterizes mosques as misplaced in German cityscapes. It is important for the ethical practice of architectural history to recognize the importance for minority communities of the diverse buildings they make.

How to Cite This: Khorshidifard, Sara. Review of The British Mosque: An Architectural and Social History, by Shahed Saleem, JAE Online, November 6, 2020.

The Design Voice Podcast seeks to elevate and amplify the voices of women in the architecture, engineering, and construction professions. Each episode features honest conversations with those who shape the built environment. By telling their stories, this podcast hopes to serve as a source of education, inspiration and empowerment. New episodes are released the first and third Wednesday of each month.

In this episode, we talk about:

• Mani’s experience of growing up in Iran, and how she came to embrace her intersectional identity

• On feeling in-between

• Finding and meeting other Iranian-American architects

• The duality of being a mother and working professional, and Mani’s advice for how to merge the two sides of yourself

• How Mani made the transition from working at private architectural firms to becoming a Senior Planner at Stanford University School of Medicine

• Mani’s volunteer work with the Women in Architecture Committee for the AIA Silicon Valley, and how organizations like WIA have evolved to become more than just about women’s issues.

• Mani’s experience during COVID and having her two adult sons at home (they made a tik tok video!)

A team of Drury University faculty have created a crystalline design for the Springdale Veteran Memorial Competition. Sited in Arkansas, the proposal was made by Sara Khorshidifard, Payman Sadeghi and Karen Spence. Using the crystal metaphor and drawing inspiration from its shape, formation, and built tactility, the concept is made to capitalize on the Diamond State’s history and topology.

As the team states, the competition entry strives to create spaces and experiences that, like stages of crystallization, "manifest intermediary qualities, seizing manifold realities, variant emotions, and even contraries." Looking at in-between spaces, the project is a play in opacity and symbolism. "Like human life, crystals hold many facets, substances shaping from uncertainty and hesitation of liquid crystal, hardening with strength and determination of solid gem." The monument and memorial site are directly driven by the physiographic of the place, stemming from the regional prevalence of crystals due to synergies between thermal waters and magnetic lodestone.

"The Arkansas Plateau’s unique geography offers inimitable ecologies and geologies that form gemstone deposits, precious diamonds, turquoises, and quartz crystals. Site design assemblies also use conceptual shaping forces that reflect abstract dimensions in an act of crystallization, generating a continuous landscape of plentiful thresholds and sophisticated strata." The new memorial proposal was made to resemble a folded-out crystalline structure with triangulating plains carved and tacked with/in rhizomatic connections.

The memorial landscape concept was envisioned with three united parts: a linear elevated platform (Scar), a triangulated open field (Stitch), and a healing garden (Settle).

Hovering over existing topography grades, the elevated platform (Scar) stretches to create a linear axial connection from the northern entry towards the Crystalline Monument. The bar edifice accentuates three anchors at entry, mid, and ending points. The entry anchor includes ADA-accessible ramps, stairs, and an elevator. The current pavilion at mid anchor is now shifted under the raised platform and is wrapped, re-skinned and repurposed to serve as garden shed. A new, elongated pavilion structure is added to the west to serve the playground area and healing garden patches to the south. Experienced on foot and at human scale, the elevated path is programmed as an open-air gallery space expressing the experiences of veterans.

The field (Stitch) is a constructed landscape shaped as a continuous triangulated quilt consisting of folded edges and wedge-shape plains. The field connects the elevated memorial platform with the adjacent neighborhood. Symbolically, the crystallized landscape pleats form six node intersections, representing six branches of US military. The field is also engraved with two specifically pathways notches. Extending in parts underneath the memorial platform, these walkways are carved at a lower grade to act as physical linkages from neighborhood edges to the parking.

The healing garden (Settle) is placed in the southern end of the site. The circular juncture of the platform and the field acts as main entry into the garden. The memorial concept considers healing to be an important stage in a veteran’s journey. Landscape planning keeps the existing trees intact, while using them as a buffer to define a spatially secluded sanctuary. Arkansas native sensory plants are placed throughout the garden. In addition to herbs with medicinal properties, garden patches include other native and adaptive shade and sun plants. Overall, the healing garden component is integrated to provide closure in a veteran’s experience of the site and a way to serve the larger community.

Abstract

I’m Mani Helene Ardalan Farhadi, an Iranian-American Muslim Woman – a ‘Triple-Threat’ minority. My story is YOUR story too. How many of you live at the intersection of race, culture, religion, ethnicity, background, nationality, and gender? This is a story for all of us.

#EQXDV (Equity by Design - Voices, Values, Vision Symposium 2018) brought together a kaleidoscope of perspectives. Honored to be a “Thought Leader,” I addressed “Intersectionality and Intercultural Intelligence” for the first time with fellow trailblazing panelists Prescott Reavis and A.L. Hu, facilitated by Rosa Sheng. On November 3, 2018, threads knit together into a tapestry, as we shared personal stories.

What happens when a group of architects gathers into a circle to share personal stories? Magic!

About 18 women and 2 men attended the April 18, 2018 WIA event Connecting Through Coaching: To Oneself and to Others, led by speaker and Coach extraordinaire Lynn Simon, FAIA, and hosted by Hawley Peterson Snyder. Simon is a Vice President at Thornton Tomasetti in San Francisco.

“Negotiating Compensation with Confidence” featured two speakers from opposite sides of the table relaying strategies for salary negotiation in a collection of earnest, considered, and open conversations. One year prior, Mani A. Farhadi had negotiated her position as Project Director at Taylor Design, where Laurie Dreyer is the current Director of Development. Each explored and exposed dynamic, behind-the-scenes elements that contribute to negotiation including differences and decisions in career trajectories, business development, and communication modes. By the end, it was evident to participants that salary is more than just a number; it is an expression of complex fiscal, personal, and career considerations at a given moment in one’s life and in the context of socio-economic developments.

Archimoms have it ALL… this is a project I started recently to amplify voices of archimoms in the profession who have been there, conquered that. The intention of this series is to showcase everyday women in architecture who did not step because they had to fulfill their maternal roles at home. These are the stories of women who found struggled to do it “all”, who defined their “all”, and have set out great examples for young archimoms by showing how to balance it “all”.

Stewardship emanates from an architecture aiming at designing the future. The architecture is projecting optimistic change while acting small. In an anticipation of making the world a better place, the steward architect can detect the needs and guides solutions through materializing spaces.  Architecture can work to address some of the biggest challenges the world is facing today.

You know those moments when you wonder just how you’re going to get everything done? It happens to me all the time. Last Wednesday, I got 2 hours of sleep before waking up to finish a client presentation, wrap 4 presents, swing by a bakery, and throw a baby shower for a fellow volunteer, all before starting work at 9am. The day followed with a 2-hour conference call, a mad dash to grab a bite, eating lunch while driving an hour to the client meeting, leading the discussions, then driving back for an hour towards home and catching the end of my son’s volleyball scrimmage. This doesn’t happen every day (thank goodness!), but this kind of busy day is relatively common for working women like myself.