Abbas Gharib

• Name — Abbas Gharib • Native Name — عباس غزیب • Born — 16 June 1942 • Birthplace — Tehran, Imperial State of Iran • Died — 6 February 2025 • Place of death — Verona, Italy • Occupation — * Architect • designer • Education — Università Iuav di Venezia • Years Active — 1980–2025 • Website — studiogharib.net

• Illustration — Abbas Gharib's home in 1951 Gharib was born in Tehran and raised in an Iranian family. The family resided in the old traditional center of Tehran. He completed his primary education in Tehran at Bersabé Primary School, Saint Luis Elementary and Ferdowsi middle school. In 1952, his family moved to a new house in the northern part of the city, where he resided until 1960, when he received his diploma from Hadaf Educational Group high school. In 1958, he made his first visit to Europe, where he decided to leave his native country. In 1962, he moved to Italy and enrolled at the University IUAV of Venice, where he remained until 1973, participating in the city's educational and artistic life. As a child and later as a student, he showed an early interest in geometry and drawing. In 1972, he married an Italian architect, Sandra Villa, and had two children with her- Samì (12 January 1972), now a sociologist, and Leila (28 February 1983), now a musician.

In May 1958, at the end of an extensive trip through the main European cities, Gharib, then aged sixteen, visited Rome for the first time. He was deeply impressed by the city's beauty and the richness of its art and architecture. In 1960 he returned to Europe and Italy, journeying through the peninsula from north to south. The beauty of Venice, its cultural and artistic lifestyle, and the presence of creative figures like Peggy Guggenheim, Lucio Fontana, Allen Ginsberg, Ezra Pound, and Carlo Scarpa in the Sixties and Seventies, influenced him to settle there. This move from his origins in Tehran was central to his future direction.

• Illustration — April 1965, with Le Corbusier University IUAV of Venice, Italy. He studied architecture at the Università Iuav di Venezia and in 1969 qualified in urban planning, though he never abandoned his interest in architectural projects and design. This dual interest is evident in his practice. In the 1980s, he shifted from two-dimensional evaluation of projects to three-dimensional evaluation of complex perspectives. This was an influential area in his post-graduate self-formation, freeing him from the Modernist grid towards unconfined volumes characterized by transparency, fluidity, flexibility, and smooth, dynamic curving surfaces.

* • Illustration — POL Culture and Art Centre: "Fluid, Flexible and Dynamic" — • Illustration — POL Culture and Art Centre: "Continues, Smooth and Heterogeneous" Gharib gradually distanced himself from Modern Movement design methods, considering them abstract and self-referential. He oriented himself towards the post-contemporary movement and Complexity Theory, which, in his view, had a closer relationship with the shifting context. He was aware that these components, interacting with politics, economies, science, technology, and social movements, generated sophisticated results that required complex solutions. The Studio transitioned from the traditional notions of modern Rationalism to the concept of anthropo-geo-morpho-genesis—from ideas of Morphology and Topography to the advanced science of Morphing and Topology. Consequently, design, for both architectural spaces, urban planning, and physical objects, is based on renewed attention to interactive relationships between space and the surrounding context. This recognition of the interactive dynamics between nature and culture and between social and economic components has been accompanied by digital integration of projects into three-dimensional spaces, replacing the linear, flat, two-dimensional projections typical of Modernist methods.

The Pritzker Architecture Prize of 2014, awarded to Japanese architect Shigeru Ban, places him among the first to move towards Social architecture and to share the new trends in architectural planning. This prompted leading architects to consider the lifestyle of social architecture instead of personal styles. For the renovated approach of his Studio in Italy, creativity stands in promoting design solutions able to feed urban regeneration as cultural, inventive, educational, and functional diversities for new languages and lifestyles. This avoids repeating mannerist projects and their results, believing that creative solutions are fed by environmental components rather than by designers. His role in evolving the method of creative development in the Tenstar Community Association proposes an education that transforms urban regeneration into added value through the interaction of creative disciplines via the development of an integrated set of creative disciplines. This added value allows the users of the projects to meet their operational needs in an area renovated with a sustainable long-term economy based on knowledge use (knowledge-based production) rather than on energy dispersion (energy-based production).

As one of the founders of Tenstar Community, a multidisciplinary cultural Association, he was involved with the Association's sectors, such as cinema, music, visual arts, and photography, besides architecture and urban regeneration. These involvements included designing workshops and events for these disciplines or being invited as a jury member in film festivals such as San Giò Film Festival and participating in workshops such as the one with Iranian Director Abbas Kiarostami, who was awarded the Tenstar Community Cinematography Prize 2015: "Why Cinema."

Gharib became a licensed architect in 1969 and practiced in Venice until 1973. From 1974 to 1980 he worked outside Italy. In 1981 he opened his office in Verona, Italy, under the name of Studio Gharib, Architecture & Design. The design method in his studio is fluid and meta-metric, as opposed to the abstract methods and metric process of Modernism. The multiple sequences of spatial sections and the successions of constructive models have replaced flat and static drawings. The Studio, in collaboration with professionals, has ventured into a wide range of disciplines, striving to break the boundaries imposed by traditional constraints. This unconventional approach to design has produced a spirit of independence, reflected in the research and works created by the Studio. The forms of spaces and objects are reflected in numerous designs for architectural competitions, professional projects, and buildings, evidencing a multi-disciplinary approach.

• "19th century interventions in Vienna: Reading of the Ring", lecture at University IUAV of Venice, Italy, 1971. • "Topics of the New Architectural Trends", lecture at University of Tehran, Faculty of Architecture, Iran, 1973. • "Tribal memory in the architectural thought", at the International Congress of Architecture, Shiraz, Iran, 1975. • "Monuments of underdevelopment", lectures at University IUAV of Venice, Italy, 1976. • " Self-expressive buildings", lecture at the University of Tehran, Faculty of Architecture, Iran, 1978. • "Post-modernism, deconstruction and folding in architecture", at the cycle of conferences organized by the Ministry of Housing and Construction, Tehran, Iran, 1985; • "The Toppled Garden", lecture given to the "Società Letteraria", Verona, Italy, 1992. • "The Mirror Garden", lectures at the "Course of garden arts", University IUAV of Venice, Italy,1993. • "Lines, thoughts and design assumptions", lecture at the "International Day of Furniture", organized by "Abitare il Tempo", Verona, Italy,14–18 October 1993. • “Post-contemporary: danger and opportunity": lectures at the Institute for Urban Studies in Architecture USA Institute, Verona, Italy 1994. • "Space: continuous, cohesive, and heterogeneous", lectures at the Institute for Urban Studies in Architecture New York, N.Y., US. • "Space: continuous, cohesive, and heterogeneous" lectures at Teague University, Department of Architecture, Teague, Korea, 1995. • "Space of the urban place", at the international design seminar for the new building of the University IUAV of Venice, Italy, 1996. • "Paradigms of complexity in architecture new trends", lecture at "AGAV" Conference, the Young Architects Association, Verona, Italy, 2000. • "Design, Design system, and Design of professionalism", lectures at Academy of Fine Arts, Verona, Italy 2000 – 2010.