City in Lost Scale

Exhibition by Navid Salajegheh

May 3-8, 2013
Raf Gallery

“City in Lost Scale” is a set of bird’s eye views from an imaginary urban space. This space is a result by “mise en scène” of abstract volumes drawn in the Tehran’s street plan. As if that all the building masses are omitted and the only thing remained is the empty space, divided by the alleys, avenues and highways.
This sudden absence of the mass from space, is a new occasion to rewrite urban forms. This time, the composition of the new volumes redefines the relation between the void and the mass and how the center manifest itself against the margin. In a free, thoughtless and exaggerated way it tries to presents a new physiognomy of the city, in which, dimensions of the volumes and their distances are ten times bigger than the real scale. This is in fact an attempt to establish an urban “Trauma” through reproducing and enlarging the geometry of the modern city.
While each picture projects a different view of the city, the choice of colors relates the space to the time and to a special moment of the day. The changes of colors of the light in each painting, makes the time recognizable for the viewers .The first picture is a foggy morning for the center of the emerged city. The second, is the sunset in a marginal part of Tehran, connecting Lavasanat to the center. In the last painting, the city fades in the empty grey background in the absence of colors, leaving a maximized reflection of the ambient light on the roofs.

Navid Salajegheh was graduated in architecture from Azad University of Tehran in 2007 and in urban design from Marseille’s National School of Architecture in 2009.