Demographically open public spaces provide valuable grounds for engaging diverse ideologies. While the rise of society and passive consumption of mass culture excludes “action” and “speech” from the public realm and threatens human plurality, a public space in which to hold public debates and discussions will reengage public roles in the public realm. And it will consequently act as a new site for citizenship and new “space of appearance.” Such space becomes even more essential in a society that dreads conflict. Focusing on Iranian society, the proposal integrates this overlooked opportunity by offering temporary debate interventions to be used around the Iranian cities on a regular basis, envisioning a culture of dialogue incrementally developing. This is a way of approaching a sociological issue with the help of Architecture, making a role for public space in promoting a culture, a culture that encourages human plurality and appreciates engaging the wide range of diverse ideologies, convictions and viewpoints. Rather than proposing a closed narrative and one single architectural solution for the space of public debate, the thesis imagines an architectural toolkit for application to the specific cultural and urban context.

Demographically open public spaces provide valuable grounds for engaging diverse ideologies. While the rise of society and passive consumption of mass culture excludes “action” and “speech” from the public realm and threatens human plurality, a public space in which to hold public debates and discussions will reengage public roles in the public realm. And it will consequently act as a new site for citizenship and new “space of appearance.” Such space becomes even more essential in a society that dreads conflict. Focusing on Iranian society, the proposal integrates this overlooked opportunity by offering temporary debate interventions to be used around the Iranian cities on a regular basis, envisioning a culture of dialogue incrementally developing. This is a way of approaching a sociological issue with the help of Architecture, making a role for public space in promoting a culture, a culture that encourages human plurality and appreciates engaging the wide range of diverse ideologies, convictions and viewpoints. Rather than proposing a closed narrative and one single architectural solution for the space of public debate, the thesis imagines an architectural toolkit for application to the specific cultural and urban context.

Cervantes' Don Quixote (1605, 1615) is one of the most significant works of European literature. In the 20th century, the two-part novel became one of the fundamental texts for literary and cultural theorists, on which they based their theoretical studies on writing, literature, and culture in general. But do external theoretical views agree with a specific literary history? The diploma thesis presents three selected interpretations of Don Quixote (by V. Shklovsky, M. Bakhtin, and M. Foucault), which are compared with the findings from Spanish studies and with the novel in the original. At the same time, the reading of theoretical works should not be primarily revisionist; the thesis has a comparative character, and the aim is to express the relation between external and internal views of Cervantes' novel.