The Architecture of Intoxication: Opium Dens, Use of Bodies and New World Orders

What is the relationship between the experience of intoxication and the built environment in which it occurs? This article reflects on how the materiality of spaces of intoxication offers a lens for exploring the interplay between bodily and psychic experiences and their connection to the emerging world orders. We focus on the architecture of so-called opium dens as largely unexplored historical sites, examining how they shaped consumers and embodied tensions between meaning-making and meaning-erasure. To do so, the article situates intoxication within its political context in public space before analysing elements such as darkness, light, order, smell, and bodily arrangements in architectural renewal plans informed by paradigms of order, clarity, whiteness, and minimalism under the state-making project initiated with the Iranian Constitutional Revolution (1905-1911) through to the restoration of Mohammad Reza Shah (1955). We argue that the architecture of intoxication materialised an alternative world order, centred on bodily practices, in contrast to the modernist state and its architectural models. Drawing on novel primary sources from Iranian archives, including reports on opium dens, architectural drawings, images, visitors’ accounts and commentaries by leading revolutionaries, the article employs an interdisciplinary approach that integrates historical, anthropological, and architectural perspectives.