Kasra Padyab is an architect and architectural anthropologist working at the intersection of sensory studies, architectural theory, and the anthropology of the built environment. His research asks how architecture is known through the body before it is understood as form and space — through the senses, movement, gender, behavior, perception, and everyday practice — and brings embodied ethnography, environmental psychology, and phenomenology to bear on architectural education and urban life.
He completed his doctorate in architecture in 2023 with a dissertation entitled Anthropology of Architectural Design Education, examining design-thinking education through the relationship between embodied experience and imagination, conducted through a mixed-methods, multi-layered research design across Iran, Türkiye, and Cyprus. The work produced an anthropological model for design pedagogy grounded in a body–mind approach, together with an assessment instrument for evaluating perceptual and representational difference among architecture students. He subsequently held a research fellowship at Iran University of Science and Technology, funded by the competitive research grant of Iran’s National Elites Foundation, for an ethnographic study of multisensory perception in architectural education. In recognition of his research record, the Foundation also granted him the national elite distinction reserved for exceptional scholars.
An ongoing strand of his work examines the relationship between architectural spatial perception and sexual satisfaction, approached through gender differences in couples’ perception of domestic space and pursued through registered clinical-trial protocols. To his knowledge, this is the first sustained ethnographic treatment of the subject in Iranian and wider Middle Eastern Islamic contexts, where it has remained largely unexamined.
His current work concerns the sensory ordering of cities in the Arabian Gulf. Drawing on six months of embodied ethnographic fieldwork in Muscat, Oman, his book manuscript Living in the White City: An Embodied Experience of the Anthropology of Architecture and Behaviour in Muscat traces how climate, materiality, food, ritual, sound, and everyday movement shape the perception of urban space, using the researcher’s own migrant body as the primary instrument of inquiry. The manuscript is under consideration with Routledge’s Sensory Studies series.
Drawing is central to his method rather than illustrative of it. His ethnographic archive includes over three thousand croquis and sketches of historic buildings, alongside a study of fifteen hundred children’s drawings and interview and survey research with some three thousand participants. He has held several exhibitions of his sensory croquis of environment, in which drawing functions as a research practice: a way of slowing the body in place and recording what a trained hand registers of climate, material, and atmosphere.
An award-winning architect and a nominee for the 2A Architecture Awards, he practises as a registered architect in Iran, Oman, and elsewhere in the Gulf. Recognized as a distinguished teacher in Iranian universities, he has taught some eight thousand students across several countries, including Iran, Türkiye, and Oman, and has delivered numerous invited lectures and keynote talks in Iran, Türkiye, Cyprus, and Oman. Kasra Padyab (2025), a documentary on his life and work, was produced in Iran. He serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Art and Design, on the scientific committees of the International Psychological Applications Conference and Trends (InPACT), and as a reviewer for journals including Family Relations and Heliyon. He juries international architecture competitions and is a permanent juror of the INSPIRELI International Award for Architecture. He works in Persian, English, Arabic, and Turkish, and reads Braille and sign language.
Research interests: sensory anthropology of architecture; embodied and autoethnographic methods; drawing as research practice; the relationship between architectural spatial perception and sexual satisfaction; gendered perception; architectural education; environmental psychology; Gulf urbanism; vernacular architecture.
