This book explores the transformation of home culture and domestic architecture in twentieth century Iran. While highlighting the role of architects and urban planners since the turn of the century, the book also studies the interplay between foreign influences, gender roles, consumer culture, and women's education as they intersect with taste, fashion, and interior design.
"The modern and contemporary history of Iran has been seen more from political and ideological perspectives.Domesticity and Consumer Culture in Iran: Interior Revolutions of the Modern Era is an insightful and brilliantresponse to this gap in scholarship." - Ehsan Lor Afshar, The New School for Social Research, New York, USA, Journal of Design History
"Pamela Karimi's Domesticity and Consumer Culture in Iranis a thought-provoking examination of the intersection of domestic architecture, consumerism, and the social transformation of taste in twentieth-century Iran." - Talinn Grigor, Brandeis University, Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review
"A really good social analysis can take a seemingly minor issue and use it as a lens through which to examine multiple aspects of a complex system. Pamela Karimi has done exactly that in her impressively researched study of Domesticity and Consumer Culture in Iran....this is a fascinating and wideranging study, exemplary in the breadth and depth of scholarship Karimi has brought to bear. It will be enormously valuable to anyone interested in issues of urbanization, gender roles, experiences of modernity and modernization, consumer culture and aesthetics, and Iranian social and material history. Karimi is one of the first scholars to consider the role of consumer culture in making the Iranian experience of modernity ... but this book will not only be of interest to scholars of Iran." -Norma Claire Moruzzi, Middle East Report (Winter 2015)