Displacement of Figure and Ground in Historic Urban Facades: The 30 Tir–Mirza Kuchak Khan Corridor in Tehran

Historic streets in metropolitan centers accumulate layers of meaning that are continually rearranged with each wave of physical and functional transformation. The 30 Tir and Mirza Kuchak Khan street corridor in Tehran, is an illustrative example of this condition. Once characterized by places of worship belonging to religious minorities, embassies, and cultural institutions, the corridor is now remembered above all for its pedestrianized, stone-paved stretch of eateries. Study asks how the mental image formed of such a corridor has been constituted in the minds of its observers and users, and how this image relates to the corridor’s multifaceted past. To answer, the Gestalt principle of figure and ground is employed as an analytical framework and articulated in conjunction with Lynch’s concepts of legibility and imageability, Cullen’s serial vision, Gibson’s concept of affordances, and the phenomenological tradition of place. The theoretical argument of the article holds that the identity of a street corridor is not a fixed and physical attribute, but rather a perceptual and situated construct resulting from the intersection of three factors - the physical characteristics of the figure-forming elements of the facade, the observer’s cognitive background, and the manner in which the observer acts and moves through space - with time operating as a transversal factor. On this basis, it is argued that the corridor under study has accommodated at least four simultaneous and at times incompatible perceptual images, each arising from the predominance of one of these factors. Rather than a narrative of “identity loss,” the findings point to a displacement in the hierarchy of figure and ground over time, yielding implications for the urban planning of historic urban fabrics. The study adopts a qualitative interpretive case-study strategy, combining documentary-historical analysis with structured field observation of the facades, and presents its perceptual propositions as testable hypotheses.