Kish. An Island Indecisive by Design

Kish, an Island Indecisive by Design tells the intriguing story of the modern development of an Iranian island in the Persian Gulf. Kish is an island where the extremes of politics, architecture and urban design visibly collide. In this book, Nasrin Tabatabai and Babak Afrassiabi give an evocative account of an architecture that persists in being a symptom of an ‘unresolved modernity’.

As a result of the shifting ideologies on mainland Iran in the last five decades, this ‘free zone’ resort has been the stage of conflicting desires for openness and resistance to the outside world. This is manifested most of all through excessive forms of architecture and planning, built and unbuilt across the island since the late 1960s, which in time have constituted a misplaced historical disposition for the island.