Dr. Khosrow Bozorgi is Endowed Professor of Architecture and Urban Design and Presidential Professor at the University of Oklahoma’s Christopher C. Gibbs College of Architecture. At the College, he founded the Ph.D. Program in Planning, Design, and Construction—the first doctoral program of its kind at the university—as well as the Center for Middle Eastern Architecture and Culture, an interdisciplinary research unit devoted to the comparative study of built form across civilizational boundaries. Dr. Bozorgi earned his Bachelor and Master of Architecture from the National University of Iran in 1975, and went on to receive both a Master’s degree and a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, where his doctoral work explored the intersections of design theory and architectural history.
Dr. Bozorgi’s research is concerned with the morphology of architectural and urban forms across the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe. He is especially attentive to the ways in which inherited spatial practices can simultaneously sustain and unsettle the prevailing paradigms of contemporary urban development. Over the course of extensive fieldwork spanning five distinct cultural domains—Roman-period settlements in Tunisia, medieval urban fabric in Morocco, Safavid-era civic and commercial complexes in Iran, Hanseatic mercantile architecture in northern Germany, and ancestral Puebloan building traditions in the American Southwest—Dr. Bozorgi has identified a remarkably persistent pattern: across these geographically remote and historically independent civilizations, the built environment is consistently organized through a tripartite spatial sequence, moving from an outward-facing public realm through a semi-private transitional zone to a protected interior domain. He terms this phenomenon convergent architectural evolution, arguing that independent societies, without mutual contact or shared precedent, arrive at analogous spatial solutions to enduring human needs—among them the mediation of climate, the regulation of social encounter, and the graduated calibration of privacy.
Dr. Bozorgi’s scholarly perspective is deeply informed by more than four decades of professional practice as a designer with internationally recognized architectural firms across the United States, Europe, and the Middle East, where he has contributed to significant built works on three continents. This sustained engagement with the realities of design and construction at an international scale lends his theoretical work a groundedness that distinguishes it within the field. A recipient of the Graham Foundation grant, Dr. Bozorgi is the author of three major volumes: the forthcoming The Grammar of Space: Architectural Patterns Across Time and Culture (Birkhäuser, 2027), which lays out the theoretical architecture for convergent spatial organization; Medieval Courtyard Design: Converging Urban Morphologies from Europe to the Middle East (Routledge, 2025), which reconceives the courtyard’s bounded void as architecture’s primary generative principle; and The Philadelphia House: Organic Architecture and Placemaking in Chestnut Hill (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023), which examines how formal design and vernacular American building traditions can be integrated in the pursuit of place-specific authenticity. Across these works, Dr. Bozorgi’s methodology—grounded in original measured drawings, comprehensive site documentation, and longitudinal comparative analysis—demonstrates that rigorous cross-cultural inquiry can reveal universal principles of spatial organization at work beneath the particularities of cultural expression.
