About

The published webpages are a part of my PhD dissertation, which explores the connections between Persianate gardens. Persianate Gardens have a long-held history and play an outstanding cross-cultural role in the Iranian and Deccan plateaus. Despite the gardens’ transnational values, the significant works of literature emphasize documentation and forms using national lenses. The nation-based outlook can also be seen in UNESCO’s World Heritage interpretation, which prompts a fragmented narrative of the gardens’ development. Moreover, UNESCO’s documentation on Persian gardens is predominantly textual, meaning that they did not fully capture the significance of visual and multimodal interpretation of heritage. To address the gaps, this research proposes the investigation of Timurid, Safavid, and Mughal gardens through a transnational lens, while exploring the unconventional format of heritage interpretation by creating multimodal arguments. The study employs visual-centric methods, namely cognitive mapping, content analysis, and comparative evaluation, to examine a visual diagram created out of UNESCO’s detached dataset on the Timurid, Safavid, and Mughal gardens. Meanwhile, it applies a new set of criteria based on shared architectural concepts to unfold the connections and consistency in the gardens.