As part of an ongoing series of posts highlighting faculty and alumni projects featured in and associated with the Venice Biennale’s current 17th International Architecture Exhibition, the School of Architecture is pleased to share The Zayandeh-rud River Basin, a project by Dean Tehrani’s office NADAAA.

This project is NADAAA’s contribution to Future Assembly—a curatorial initiative developed in response to Hashim Sarkis’s invitation, as the curator of the Biennale, “to imagine a design inspired by the United Nations—the current paradigm for a multilateral assembly.” Future Assembly invited all Biennale participants, more than 50 of whom participated, to address the following prompt: 

“The Assembly of the future we envisage consists not only of humans but also of animals and plants, the ephemeral traces and voices of multiple species, and of the air, the water, the trees, the soil. How do we, as spatial practitioners, imagine giving standing to these more-than-human voices in a vision for our shared future?” 

The Zayandeh-rud River Basin weaves together an aerial view of Isfahan—a city in central Iran—with a planimetric scan revealing various institutions that populate the city’s urban fabric in confrontation with its larger river watershed. The animation draws on the Beaux-Arts tradition of the Analytique, a composite representational technique, which here has been critically reinterpreted through seamless, kinetic montage sequences that synthesize divergent representational methods—including photographic, planimetric, and perspectival elements—toward a shared narrative.

The delicate balance between cities, historic preservation, and social ecologies is commonly overlooked, especially when questions of energy policy and larger territorial legislation are involved. At the same time, key historical examples help to frame these possible connections in poignant ways. As a critical hydrological conduit that overcomes the commonly held divide between rural and urban cultures, the Zayandeh-rud river basin serves agricultural lands as much as it gives birth to the city of Isfahan as we know it. 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. Isfahan’s viaducts, left to wither in this new landscape, have lost the waters that once gave them a reason to bridge. The Zayandeh-rud, the iconic Sio-se-pol bridge, and the entire river basin are the “more-than-human” voices NADAAA nominates for this narrative dedicated to the United Nations Assembly of the Future.