What Gio Ponti’s Villa Nemazee in Tehran reveals about Iran today

This article is scheduled to appear in the 1109th issue of Domus, due to be published in February 2026.

Tehran, 1964. Gio Ponti delivers Villa Namazee to Shafi and Vida Nemazee, a wealthy Persian bourgeois couple. Modernist lines, spaces that express the joy of living, blue ceramics by Fausto Melotti. A piece of Italy grafted onto the Shah's Persia. Thirty years later, not far from the Villa, a literature professor, Azar Nafisi, gathers veiled students in her living room to read Nabokov. Two seemingly distant stories. Yet Ponti's villa is already that living room: a space where one can be other than what power demands. Ponti builds a machine for seeing. Villa Nemazee operates on "passing views": from the diamond-shaped entrance point to the living room's glass wall, the gaze traverses the entire floor plan without obstacles. Palladio in Tehran, in other words, but with a twist: here transparency must reckon with the separation between social life and family life, with the climate, with an idea of privacy that the West doesn't know.

The villa is double. Stage and refuge. From the formal dining room—the table arranged frontally, almost like a Last Supper—to the family spaces on the upper floor, Ponti orchestrates intersecting views. Planimetric focal points marked by an eye, literally. One looks and is looked at, but according to precise, codified rules. Transparency is calibrated, never naive. When Ponti designs the villa for Abbas Nemazee between 1957 and 1964, Persia still lives under the Shah, in that historical window before the Revolution that would change everything. The Italian architect builds a manifesto of modernity: pure lines, ceramics that dialogue with Persian tradition while reinterpreting it, a lightness that challenges the gravity of the context. It's not just a house. It's a statement, as we would say today. An affirmation of possibility, of openness toward the West, of cultured cosmopolitanism.

Nafisi too, decades later, builds a machine for seeing in reduced form, in her Tehran living room. We're in the nineties, the Islamic Revolution has transformed the country that Ponti saw. Women must cover themselves, Western books are prohibited or viewed with suspicion. Yet Nafisi, in her living room, reads Nabokov, Fitzgerald, James. She creates, in other words, a space—physical, mental—where literature becomes refuge, where imagination can still breathe. Where the eye can see at home what is forbidden outside the home.

Villa Nemazee works exactly like this. It's Nafisi's living room translated into architecture. An interior that protects, that safeguards, that allows one to be different from what the external world imposes. The windows, the rooms, the decorations blend Persian motifs and Italian sensibility. They're like the pages of Lolita read in Farsi: an impossible hybrid, perhaps scandalous, certainly necessary. Ponti didn't know Nafisi, obviously. But both understood the same thing: when the world outside becomes hostile, private space becomes political. The villa in Teeran, with its refined interiors and its uncompromising modernity, was already an act of cultural resistance. It affirmed that one could be Persian and modern, Eastern and Western, faithful to tradition and projected toward the future.

Nafisi writes that when her students removed their veils upon entering her house, they weren't just uncovering their hair. They were claiming a multiple, complex identity, not reducible to the regime's slogans. Villa Nemazee does the same: it doesn't renounce Iran, it amplifies it, puts it in dialogue with the world. It says that Iran is more than what it appeared. And appears today. Ponti and Nafisi did something profoundly subversive. The former doesn't build a Western edifice transplanted to Persia. He studies, understands, absorbs. And then returns something new, a language that is simultaneously local and universal. Just like Nafisi, who tries to teach her girls that one can love Austen and Hafez, that Nabokov, James, Fitzgerald can also speak to a veiled woman in Tehran.

Today Villa Nemazee still exists, a silent witness to a Tehran that no longer exists or perhaps never was. Like the forbidden books read in that clandestine living room, it continues to whisper that other ways of being exist, other possible spaces. Because architecture, like literature, can be an act of radical imagination. And resistance isn't always loud. Sometimes it's a perfect line, a blue ceramic, an underlined page. Sometimes it's simply insisting that beauty has the right to exist, that complexity cannot be crushed, that a space—a living room, a villa—can contain entire worlds. Those same worlds that are exploding in these hours.

Ponti and Nafisi have built, each in their own way, two architectures of freedom. Fragile, besieged, but stubbornly present, stubbornly alive. The difference is that about ten years ago the regime saved Ponti's masterpiece from speculation, while it forced Nafisi to leave Iran for her masterpiece. Proof that freedom remains a symbol, but bricks are less frightening than words.

Opening image: Domus 422, January 1965