Dr. Khosrow Bozorgi is an endowed Professor of Architecture at the University of Oklahoma’s Christopher C. Gibbs College of Architecture. He earned his undergraduate degree from the National University of Iran in 1975 and completed both his Master’s and Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1980s, specializing in design theory and architectural history.
Dr. Bozorgi is the founding director of OU’s Ph.D. Program in Planning, Design, and Construction and established the Center for Middle Eastern Architecture and Culture. His research investigates the morphology of architectural and urban forms across the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe, with a focus on how traditional spatial practices respond to contemporary urban development.
With over four decades of professional experience—including work with leading firms in the United States and France—he has contributed to major projects across three continents. A Presidential Professor and recipient of a Graham Foundation grant, Dr. Bozorgi’s scholarship includes The Philadelphia House: Organic Architecture and Placemaking in Chestnut Hill (2023), which examines how architects integrate formal design principles with American cultural traditions to create authentic, place-specific environments that move beyond stylistic imitation.
This book reveals a systematic organizational principle that has governed successful urban architecture across fifteen centuries and four continents, fundamentally transforming how we understand spatial coordination in the built environment. Through comparative analytical methodology applied to architectural documentation from Iran, Tunisia, Morocco, Germany, and Pre-Columbian New Mexico, this study demonstrates that diverse architectural traditions employ a consistent three-dimensional framework: transitional zones mediating public and private realms, intermediate chambers organizing specialized activities, and elevated quarters maintaining oversight while preserving privacy. A Safavid caravanserai in Kerman, Roman underground quarters in Tunisia, medieval districts in Fez, Hanseatic civic complexes in Lübeck, and Ancestral Puebloan ceremonial centers in Chaco Canyon all manifest this organizational logic. Despite radical differences in climate, culture, and construction, these buildings achieve coordination through identical spatial principles adapted to local conditions, dissolving conventional typological boundaries and revealing them as surface variations of deeper structural unity. The implications extend beyond historical analysis to contemporary understanding of spatial design. This organizational framework offers new interpretive tools for analyzing how successful urban architecture coordinates multiple functions across different scales, providing fresh insights into the enduring effectiveness of traditional spatial strategies. The book establishes innovative analytical approaches for architectural scholarship while demonstrating how systematic comparative analysis can reveal universal principles operating beneath cultural specificity.
Medieval Courtyard Design: Converging Urban Morphologies from Europe to the Middle East. Lead Author and Editor-in-Chief: Khosrow Bozorgi.
This groundbreaking study examines courtyard architecture across Paris, Florence, Siena, Granada, and Yazd to reveal how the deliberate creation of emptiness—the "bounded void"—functions as architecture's primary generative principle. Moving beyond conventional object-based analysis, the book demonstrates that architecture's essence lies not in built form but in calibrated absence. Through rigorous comparative analysis, readers discover how courtyards operate as environmental mediators, social organizers, and cosmological instruments across diverse cultures. The study reveals striking morphological convergences that emerge through parallel evolution rather than stylistic diffusion. Drawing on spatial cognition research, urban morphology, and phenomenological analysis, the book establishes void-focused methodology as a new theoretical framework. This paradigm shifts from analyzing solid to void transforms our understanding of both historical and contemporary spatial practice, uncovering universal principles that transcend geographic and temporal boundaries. Essential for architectural theorists questioning disciplinary orthodoxies, historians seeking alternatives to period-style categorization, and researchers investigating architecture's cognitive dimensions. The work provides both radical historiographical revision and practical insights for contemporary designers engaging with density, sustainability, and social space.
