Pearl Palace (Kakh-e Morvarid)

The Pearl Palace, Kakh-e Morvarid, stands in Mehrshahr on the western side of Karaj. It was built in the late 1960s and early 1970s for Princess Shams Pahlavi, the elder sister of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, and is one of the few buildings anywhere designed by the Frank Lloyd Wright school outside the United States. The design came from Taliesin Associated Architects, the practice that continued Wright's work after his death, led here by William Wesley Peters, Wright's former apprentice and son-in-law, working with Iranian architects in Tehran.

The building takes its name from its form. Seen from above, it curls like a shell around a pearl, and all its rooms sit beneath a spiral roof of concrete pierced by round skylights set like strings of pearl beads. A small lake wraps around it on three sides, and the interiors were planned in the organic manner Wright had championed, with spaces flowing into one another rather than set out as separate boxes. Sources differ on the exact building dates and on the cost.

After the 1979 revolution the estate was taken over by the state and for decades stood closed and neglected. In recent years it has passed to the Ministry of Cultural Heritage, Handicrafts and Tourism, which has carried out restoration with a view to opening it to visitors. Architects and students of modern design value it as a rare meeting of American organic architecture and the Iranian landscape; for many local people it is simply a familiar, half-hidden landmark of Karaj's garden suburbs.