This interview features Ronak Roshan Gilvaei is an architect, heritage conservation specialist, and founder of Ronak Roshan Office, based in Rasht, Iran.
Her work focuses on the intersection of architectural preservation, community engagement, and sustainable development, with a particular interest in the revitalisation of historic buildings and cultural landscapes.
In this interview, Ronak Roshan Gilvaei discusses her professional background and the development of Ronak Roshan Office, exploring her approach to heritage conservation and neighbourhood regeneration through projects such as the Sagharisazan neighbourhood regeneration in Rasht.
She also reflects on the challenges of leading complex heritage and construction projects as a young architect, her parallel work in healthcare architecture, and the experiences that have shaped her practice.
Tell us about your background and the start of Ronak Roshan Office.
After completing my studies, I chose to begin my professional practice in Rasht, the city where I lived. Contrary to the common belief that professional growth requires moving to the capital or abroad, I saw staying in Rasht as an opportunity to understand architecture more deeply through its people, culture, and context.
Teaching architectural sketching and design deepened this understanding further. In the early years, I took responsibility for every project, however small.
My practice initially operated through flexible teams formed around each project rather than a permanent office; this continued from 2014 until 2019, when Ronak Roshan Office was established.
Today, our work spans planning, design, restoration, renovation, construction supervision, and project management. We combine contemporary design and digital tools with local knowledge, traditional skills, and local production methods, shaping each response around users’ needs and the specific cultural, geographical, environmental, and social conditions of its context.
What are the visions, goals or principles of your practice? How does a project like the Sagharisazan neighbourhood regeneration in Rasht reflect them?
At Ronak Roshan Office, architecture is not merely about creating a building; it is an effort to balance human needs, context, environment, and social life. We bring contemporary design and tools together with the skills of master craftspeople, local production methods, and accumulated regional knowledge.
Our engagement with Sagharisazan began with the restoration of ‘Emarat’, an abandoned house over a century old, and, through our presence in the neighbourhood, expanded into an inquiry into its fabric and social life.
Since 2019, Sagharisazan Regeneration has been pursued as a voluntary, participatory twenty-year project in two ten-year phases. Rather than approaching the neighbourhood nostalgically, we study its formation, transformation, political economy, infrastructure, uses, and everyday life.
We seek gradual, non-invasive, internally driven responses to gentrification that support continuity of life, social relationships, the local economy, and collective memory, while asking whether everyday resistance and social continuity can persist amid contemporary urban change.
What are some of the challenges you’ve faced as a young architect and construction manager leading complex heritage work, and how have you overcome them?
In restoration projects, I may simultaneously oversee design, architectural decisions, construction, workforce, resources, budget, and client communication.
Historic buildings also contain many unknowns: for century-old structures, complete documentation is often unavailable, and opening up a wall or removing a layer can reveal damage that could not have been predicted and requires an immediate decision.
In northern Iran, moisture and deterioration add further complexity, demanding precision, concentration, and the ability to envision concealed conditions before intervention.
My professional path has therefore involved learning to observe more carefully, to learn continuously, and to make decisions under uncertainty.
The greatest challenge, however, is the responsibility that extends beyond the building itself. When a building is tied to people’s history, culture, and memory, my decisions are not purely technical. I have learned to act with care, take risks, and respect what has survived from the past.
Tell us about your parallel practice in healthcare architecture, and how it connects, if at all, to your heritage work.
My involvement in healthcare architecture emerged partly because restoration projects can take two years or more. After completing a small healthcare project, I decided to develop this field as a serious parallel strand of my practice. It became important to me because it directly affects human health and quality of life.
In Rasht, where healthcare spaces are often small and budgets are limited, I began asking how architecture could improve users’ experience, sense of calm, and health even at a modest scale. Projects such as Dr Javidi’s and Dr Ashouri-Moghadam’s clinics are part of this path.
Although healthcare architecture and restoration may look different, both involve human concern in real contexts and require attention, understanding, and decisions suited to specific conditions.
I also work as a strategy manager at one of the clinics we designed, connecting design, function, and project management through my managerial knowledge and interdisciplinary studies.
What are you working on now?
I am currently focused on two projects centred on heritage and sustaining life in historic contexts. The first is Sagharisazan in Rasht, ongoing since 2019. Alongside documenting the fabric, we are studying its active economy, infrastructure, patterns of use, and conditions for continued life. We are restoring two houses and a pottery workshop, while designing an abandoned house as a home and gallery.
The second is the restoration and revitalisation of the historic Eqbal Sultan Aghajani House in Lisar, western Gilan, a historic rural area affected by recent damaging interventions.
My work extends beyond the building to its landscape and surroundings: restoring its stone-and-timber structure, preserving local construction logic, organising the adjacent land, and developing a semi-natural Hyrcanian forest garden, open-air museum, and responsible ecotourism model.
Despite being about three hours from my base, I directly oversee the design, decision-making, and implementation. My healthcare work also continues.
As an architect managing projects on-site, what’s a moment a contractor or a client pushed back hard on your instructions, and how did you handle it the first time it happened?
One of my first site management experiences involved a metal detail where I proposed a different method than the metalworker’s usual approach. The issue wasn’t simply form or design preference; the detail I proposed was safer for the project. He had years of experience with his own method and initially resisted the change.
In those early years, I first tried to understand the reason for the objection and the experience behind it. I wanted to understand the craftsperson’s technical language and working method, and to find where that experience met the project’s needs.
If I concluded that the project genuinely required a different method, I tried to move the process forward through dialogue rather than simply through my position as the architect. I learned from his experience and craft while explaining why a change was necessary. Gradually, this dialogue became part of how I manage sites.
My experience with clients taught me another lesson: good design and competent site work are not enough. I also learned that expectations, decisions, finances, responsibilities, risks, and communication need to be managed.
These experiences changed how I understood project management and led me to pursue an MBA focused on project management, followed by a Post DBA. My current academic research examines the impact of emotional intelligence on project managers’ performance and ways to strengthen emotional intelligence.
For me, project management means listening and learning, building empathy and trust, managing conflict, and accepting responsibility for the final decision.
Sagharisazan has been ongoing since 2019. What’s still not true about that neighbourhood yet, that you set out to make true?
Sagharisazan has made important progress: historic buildings have been restored, abandoned structures returned to use, and our understanding of the neighbourhood’s historical, social, and economic layers has deepened.
What remains unresolved is the conflict between two understandings of ‘regeneration’. The dominant urban approach often focuses on physical improvements: paving, facade improvements, restoring landmark buildings, and introducing tourism- or consumption-based uses.
These can be part of regeneration, but for us the central question is whether life itself can continue: small-scale economies, social relationships, housing, work, and the infrastructure that makes staying possible.
Over the years, we have seen higher-level authorities overlook parts of the neighbourhood and some groups living there, even though everyday life continues through street vendors, handcart operators, fruit sellers, small shopkeepers, and long-standing workshops.
At the same time, these areas may lack urban services and infrastructure, while urban plans can require setbacks or demolition even for owner-occupied homes and shops.
This can become another form of pressure towards forced displacement, gradually removing the very life meant to be regenerated.
We therefore seek small, gradual responses rather than one predetermined intervention—restoring a house, preserving an economic activity, changing a use, addressing infrastructure, or taking action to bring an issue into public discourse.
Our goal is deep regeneration from within: preserving not only the neighbourhood’s historic appearance, but also the possibility of living there in the future.
Meet the Shortlist series is a compilation of interviews with those who have been shortlisted for our awards. Saliha Benmessaoud is on the shortlist for the Women in Architecture and Construction Award, which recognises women who have made outstanding contributions to architecture and the built environment across the Near East and North Africa.
Meet the Shortlist: Hadeel Ayed Mohammad, Dr Hiba Alkhalaf, Jomana Baddad, Meisa Batayneh, Nuha Dandis, Saliha Benmessaoud, Salima Naji, Salwa and Selma Mikoü, and Dr Zahra Hussain.
Tamayouz Excellence Award is sponsored by 99 Properties Development, Coventry University, Dewan Architects + Engineers, the Mohamed Makiya Foundation, Bonair Ltd, Aji Group, and Round City Magazine.