About IRTSN

IRTSN records what Iran has made and the engineering underneath it: six sections, twenty-four entries, each one a made thing explained by the problem it solves.

The register begins with water, because the rest of it stands on where the water came out. A qanat decides where a settlement sits; the garden downstream is the same gravity line divided four ways; the cistern and the ice house are the same problem answered with mass and shade. From there the register moves to the knot, the roofed street, the tiled field and the wall.

Every entry names the region a practice belongs to. Nothing here is drawn from anywhere in general, and nothing is dated beyond what the material itself supports. Where a term is the right word it is used and glossed once — mādar chāh, muqanni, rasteh, haft rang.

The site carries no politics, no commerce and no travel advice. It is about craft, building and landscape, written in English, and it is meant to be read in any order: the whole index is printed at the top of every page.