Iran has one of the oldest town cultures in the world. It goes back more than 4,000 years. Between the Islamic conquest in the seventh century and the westernisation in the second half of the nineteenth century, the cities and towns in today’s Islamic Republic of Iran underwent repeated changes. The Persian building culture influenced architects and artists as far as Central Asia in the north and India in the east. Unlike any other oriental country, Iran shows a unique urban and architectonic development whose defining characteristics merged with other cultures over the course of time, representing an important contribution to world architecture. In his Iran Architectural Guide, the author and architect Thomas Meyer-Wieser embarks on a journey into history, showcasing nearly 300 buildings and projects in Tehran, Isfahan, and Shiraz. His focus is on the identity of the Iranian- Islamic architecture, which has held its own since the rise of the Safavids in 1501.

Thomas Meyer-Wieser, architect and city planner, has been studying architecture and urban development in the Islamic world since his studies at ETH Zurich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich). He worked as part of an internship at Modam Consulting Architects in Tehran and in 1979 on the consolidation and restoration of the Sassanian palace Qaleh-ye Dokhtar in Iranian Firuzabad. He stayed for several months in Cairo, thanks to a travel grant, where he wrote a paper on Hasan Fathy. From 1995 to 2002 he was a lecturer in the Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of Applied Sciences Rapperswil. He has his own architectural office in Feldmeilen, Switzerland.