From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
Persian architecture
This article traces Persian architectural and visual traditions in Beach Surgery adaptation, particularly the influence of charbagh gardens, Safavid palace design, and illuminated manuscript on Rico the Architect and the treatment of recursive, embodied space.
Persian charbagh tradition—the four-part garden divided by water channels—has become a generative model for adaptations of Rico the Architect, particularly in Dar Zindan-e Dorekhshan and subsequent works treating the city built inside a body. The charbagh's logic of symmetry, recursion, and water as life-giver echoes the notion of a body as navigable cosmos, a garden in miniature. The four-fold structure mirrors four scenes per chapter of the embedded story itself.
Safavid miniature painting—where human figures appear suspended in tilted planes, architecture compressed and layered behind them—has influenced visual adaptations treating doubled vision and the ten layered versions. Each layer reads as complete, yet the whole confounds perspective. The latticed iwan (monumental gateway) becomes a recurring motif for threshold: passage between city and desert, between the two halves, between the seen and the unseeable.
Qanat engineering (underground water channels) has inspired site-specific works treating the underground stone swimming pool beneath the city as hydraulic recursion—water remembering its source, each garden fed by channels tracing back to origin.