Mariam Ghandi

Advisor: Carlos Rueda

3D architectural model in red and white, featuring people and plants, overlays a grid of small images, suggesting cultural and historical themes.
Panel
A surreal landscape with a sepia-toned wheat field in the foreground, a person surveying with equipment, and a child gazing at ancient cliff dwellings with a bubble showing a historic image. The sky is a stark white, creating a contrast with the earthy tones and giving an impression of historical reflection.
Reading the Castle Across Landscape and Time
Collage combining sketches and photos of cliffside dwellings. Central image shows two silhouetted figures in an archway. Tone is nostalgic and historical.
Fragments of the Cliff Settlement: Drawing, Memory, and Ruin
On the left, a model showcases abstract geometric structures casting shadows. On the right, a collage combines historical photos on a textured surface.
Physical Massing Study of Infill Within the Heritage site
A collage with vibrant red walls and an arched corridor transitions into an old photo of women in traditional dresses carrying pots. A small abstract design sits in the corner.
Interior Memory: Women, Craft, and Domestic Space
A vertical collage juxtaposes colorful imagery of a person spinning wool and grayscale images of shepherds with sheep. Concentric dotted circles overlap. To the right, three people in yellow, white, and black lie on a patterned rug on a snowy surface.
Phenomenology of Movement and Threshold
A traditional weaver in patterned attire works in black and white on the right, while colorful yarn balls and woven threads appear on the left for contrast.
Invisible Artist: Women, Landscape, and the Craft Economy
A detailed diorama depicts a rugged landscape with multicolored cliffs, a winding blue river, and clusters of trees. Warm, earthy tones evoke a serene atmosphere.
Physical Model of the Site

Listening to the Ruin: Women-Centered Infill Architecture and Cultural Regeneration in Izadkhast

Listening to the Ruin investigates how architecture can engage abandoned heritage sites as living cultural landscapes rather than static monuments. The project is set in Izadkhast, a historic settlement in Fars Province, Iran, whose identity has been shaped by layered inhabitation, shifting economic systems, and gradual abandonment. Developed through successive urban phases, a fortified castle, a lower village on the natural terrace, and a later upper village. the site today faces social silence, migration, and the erosion of everyday life. This project asks how contemporary architectural intervention can respond to these conditions without erasing memory or reducing heritage to image.

Through close observation, spatial analysis, archival research, and material exploration, the ruin is approached as an active condition rather than an endpoint. Even in abandonment, Izadkhast continues to shape movement, perception, and identity through its terrain, fragments, and remaining practices. The research focuses on the upper village, where the historic fabric remains largely intact but socially dormant following the decline of traditional craft and the outmigration of younger generations.

In response, the thesis proposes a women-centered infill craft and production center embedded within the upper village. Historically, carpet weaving formed a key cultural and economic practice in Izadkhast, sustained largely by women whose labor has remained invisible despite its value. The intervention reactivates this practice through spaces for weaving, teaching, gathering, and cultural exchange. Fibers may initially be brought from elsewhere, but the cultural knowledge and social life return to the site.

Rather than treating heritage as a frozen artifact, the project frames architecture as a mediator between past and present, material and memory, labor and place. By grounding design in lived conditions and cultural practice, listening to the Ruin proposes a model for regeneration in which historic environments are sustained through inhabitation, continuity, and everyday use.

Figure 1. Izadkhast as ruin, landscape, and memory: three readings of the castle revealing its material presence, abandonment, and enduring spatial character.

Figure 2. Conceptual axonometric of a women-centered infill craft and production center embedded in the upper village, reactivating weaving, teaching, and collective life through continuity with the historic fabric.