Official website of Hamid IravaniOfficial website of Hamid Iravani

Art Statement

Hamid Iravani has a Bachelor of Science in Urban Studies and Psychology and a Master in Urban Planning within the specialized field of Urban Design from Portland State University, Oregon in USA. He is also a contemporary artist painting abstract faces, personalities, attitudes, behavior and demeanor.

I have drawn faces since I was a kid, to challenge myself, because I have always been obsessed about how a few features like two eyebrows, two eyes, one nose and one mouth have determined millions of faces throughout history, present and future, all of which are unique.

I have been developing transportation mathematical models for years, replicating travel behavior by relating trip making with transportation level of service and socio-economic variables. My paintings reveal and model different behavior and characters by different line strokes, composition and color.

In my paintings, I always initially draw in a mindless stage and later plan the colors. The different moods that I experience also impacts on the distinctive faces that I paint.

Being in the transportation planning business since the mid-eighties, I have always been concerned how traffic engineering has been ruining the character of our cities in recent decades. Unfortunately, modern cities have been shaped by traffic engineering standards and roads that are treated as conduits or pipelines. Artistic cities such as Rome, Isfahan, Prague, Paris, Florence, San Francisco, Venice, etc. are no longer being planned on the premise and excuse that traffic flows need to be efficient to avoid congestion. The result in fact has been the opposite: not only do traffic conditions on super highways and wide streets fail to avoid congestion, but the human scale of the resulting urban spaces have also been compromised by wider streets developed for cars so that these are now unfriendly and charmless to people. In summary, blame on conventional traffic engineering standards did not necessarily make me an anarchist who violates all standards, but rather led me to an approach by which form defines the standards, and not vice versa. So whereas my paintings lack typical standards as a dominating component, what I paint does include careful rules, composition, use of lines, colors and a notion of how space is allocated in any of the pieces I create.

I do not only paint pretty faces, I also paint bad and ugly faces. More importantly, however, I paint the inside beauty, and the inside uninhibitedness regardless of the surface appearance.

Finally, the poem by the great prominent Iranian poet of the 13th century, Rumi, has had a great influence on me and my painting of faces:

“I am a painter, a maker of faces ; every moment I shape a beauteous form,
And then in thy presence I melt them all away.
I call up a hundred phantoms and endue them with a spirit
When I behold thy phantom, I cast them in the fire,
Art thou the vintner’s cup-bearer or the enemy of him who is sober,
Or is it thou who mak’st a ruin of every house I build ?
In thee the soul is dissolved, with thee it is mingled,
So I will cherish the soul, because it has a perfume of thee.”

(Poem by Rumi, translated by Nicholson)

Press

Hamid Acting Performance – Joker

Hamid Acting Performance _ Annie

Gulf News

Art Portfolio Magazine

Artworks Video

LIMITLESS Corporate Video

This is LIMITLESS corporate video about Hamid Iravani’s other profession beside being an artist on best practice urbanism.

CLICK HERE to see the video in You Tube.

To see Hamid’s view of transportation planning see below.

MYTHS OF ROADWAY SOLUTIONS

Roads are commodities for consumption, like many other business commodities (i.e. restaurants, cinemas, etc.). If one builds a restaurant, the success criteria for it will be its high demand and customer turnout. Unfortunately, some roadway engineers build wide asphalt roads and spaghetti interchanges, and then they stand back and wonder why it has become congested. It is about time to realize that the difference between a 2 lane road and a 6 lane expressway is that in the former you get 2 lanes of congestion and in the latter you have 6 lanes of the same – it is built to be consumed. The goals of transportation plans should change from “moving more cars” which will result in more roads and higher traffic, to moving “more people”. Such policies should promote other modes of transportation and not merely autos; people should be encouraged to change from using private autos to public transit or non-motorized means of travel.

Cities should no longer repeat the type of mistake that has occurred in the roadway systems of Los Angeles, California; Houston, Texas or other sprawled cities. The myth started when wide roads were envisioned as life savers for travelers, but, in fact, all these cities ended up allocating their resources in the worst possible way, comparing to cities that developed their road framework to fit with their public transportation system, such as San Francisco, California, and many other European cities.

It is important to understand that developing a public transit system is more than just putting rails and trains or buses on the roads. More important factors include development of the right urban framework along with densities, the correct complimentary roadway system and a Transit Oriented Development (TOD) to create a place in which alternative transportation modes, including walking, biking, and using public transportation, are equally (if not more) viable options than use of private vehicles. Having a few public transit routes, as opposed to a transit network system, in the absence of an efficient land use pattern, will impose travelers to transfer different transit lines to move from any given origin to destination, thus, discouraging ridership.

Any individual without special skills or training can advise on solving traffic congestion by widening roads, or by saying do not develop or build so roads will not get congested. Such type of remedy does not even require any special skill. The challenge for transportation planners and engineers should be how to build an efficient transportation system without further expansion of roads while promoting growth and economic activities. It is an awful thinking for authorities to say “develop less so traffic will work”. Some authorities discourage growth and development so traffic will work. Such measure like “do not develop” is synonymous to say “stop the economy, or saying that I have no solution so you halt. In reality, we see many cities where they have high densities but are moving more people in less time. The key to their success is through tackling the demand side of the transportation as opposed to its supply side. Unfortunately, one of traffic engineering weaknesses is their books, especially those who have read them in great details and try to implement their findings strictly by the book.

Books promote a concept in roadways called “Roadway Functional Classification”. This concept promotes a hierarchy of roads which start with Cul-De-Sac, then local, collectors, arterials and finally expressways. This conventional roadway setup is full of problems and not only fails to solve problems, but, actually, defeats the purpose. Such a system collects the traffic from all local roads and collectors and finally funnels it to a few expressways. Instead of providing alternative choices and evenly distributing traffic into smaller roads, it dumps all traffic into one major road. The main road receives a much higher share of traffic and all other roads remain under-utilized.

The illusion that remains in this myth is that less accessibility provides better mobility and as expressways have less access to ingress and egress, they can move traffic without any delay. Such a concept could work if no traveler needed to get in and get out of expressways. But as is, a significant proportion of traffic, on any expressway, is there because they need to go to the next interchange to get out and go back to access their original destination. If there was an intermediate access on the road they would have disembarked sooner, but unfortunately expressways can only have access points at certain distances. In addition, a good proportion of traffic on any urban expressway is there as induced trips. In other words, one would not have moved further out and lived far from the work place and cause traffic if such system did not exist to begin with. This system of roadway hierarchy, promoting expressways and interchanges, will, generally, collapse if an incident occurs; most of the expressway will be clogged. Remember, such a system promotes less access to get in and out and makes the travelers trapped.

Further, the roadway hierarchy system brings along, with it, the worst land use system which exacerbates the situation. That is to say, local roads get residential pods surrounding them and the commercial areas gather around the expressways. This means separating the origins and making them further from destinations, thus increasing traffic. Therefore the problem with land use in the conventional system is both the sprawl effect and segregation of uses. The interconnected grid roadway system with dense and narrower roads will promote mixed land use, resulting in closeness of origins to destinations.

In many supply lines there is an economy of scale which means the price per unit is reduced as the size of the supply, for the same demand segment, goes higher. For sewerage and water, for instance, a bigger pipe will cost less than several smaller pipes. In transportation and roadway system this theory does not hold. There is a diseconomy, or inefficiency, of scale in roads meaning several narrower roads will function much better than one wide road. Simply, several interconnected smaller roads will provide the travelers with many route alternatives to go from one origin to one destination. This grid system also evenly distributes traffic in all the roads. Cities are now equipping themselves with Intelligent Transportation System (ITS). One of the important components of the ITS is use of Variable Message Signs (VMS), so travelers could divert their route as needed and indicated by those signs. The difficulty with expressway system is that alternative routes do not exist to allow guidance by VMS applicable plus the next access to get out when signs alarm are not close.

Turning movement at smaller roads will also become much easier and with less delay. As soon as wider roads intersect with traffic from other roads the control system, like signals with long cycles, have to be in place and this in itself leads to longer delays. Moreover, public transit and non-motorized transportation will fit better with the grid system where roads do not follow a hierarchy.

The truth is that the conventional roadway system has failed and will not work. The alternative system described in this article is known as “New Urbanism” or “Neo-Tradition Planning” which has many advocates in advance and progressive planning. The roadway system in conformance with “New Urbanism” shortens trips and hence reduces the overall travel demand, as well as shifting the demand from private vehicles to other modes of transportation. This is a contrast to the conventional roadway system. Moreover the quality of trips in conventional roadway system is poorer. The expressways and wider roads in urban areas provide a very narrow cone of vision for travelers who use it on daily basis. The dense interconnected roadway system with narrower roads is very pleasant aesthetically, for both travelers in the vehicles, and the ones outside, because of the nicer urban fabric that can be fitted accordingly. That is the way to go for cities trying to cope with traffic otherwise they will face heavier traffic congestion, rising air pollution and higher energy consumption.