Tehran City Theatre is a unique complex in Tehran, which today is known as the largest theater in the country. Before the 1960s, there was a thriving café called Shahrdari Cafe or Baladieh Cafe at the intersection of the two vital arteries of the capital, Valiasr Street, formerly Pahlavi, and Enghelab Street, or Reza Shah, formerly a gathering place for people to spend time on weekends. It was leisure and was the second entertainment center of the city.
It was in the middle of this decade, between 1965 and 1967, that the municipality decided to change the usage of this place, and because there was a great need for a theater, the Ministry of Culture and Arts and the Department of Dramatic Arts demolished the café to, instead, build several special halls with high capacities and a variety of performing scenes. This is how the preparations for the construction of the Tehran City Theatre Complex were made in 1966. This building was built on February 29, 1972 and opened with the play Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov, directed by Arbi Avanessian, and starring Dariush Farhang, Susan Taslimi, Mehdi Hashemi, Farideh Sepah Mansour, Fahimeh Rastkar, and Parviz Pourhosseini. In the following years, the previous tradition of gathering people in front of this building continued and the city theater, to this day, is the place of various ceremonies and rituals on national and religious occasions, as well as the place of daily gathering of different sections of society from artists to students.
The architecture of the city theater, designed by Ali Sardar Afkhami, one of the contemporaries and colleagues of Houshang Seyhoun, has created a unique attraction in the heart of the capital. The area of the design land is 3000 and its infrastructure is 5600 square meters. The general shape of the building is a cylinder with an approximate diameter of 34 meters and a height of 15 meters. Various comments have been made regarding the patterns and sources of inspiration for the design of the city theater building. The circular form is taken from Tughral Tower in Rey and an interesting combination of tiles and bricks is used in it. It uniquely combines the prominent brickwork art of Iran in different periods, including the Ilkhans, by using symmetrical columns in the style of Persepolis. The circular plan of the city theater is one of the prominent features that, on the one hand, is reminiscent of the general shape of ancient Iranian theaters and, on the other hand, is based on the general pattern of ancient Greek and Roman amphitheaters such as the Colosseum. One of the factors that attracts a large audience to this space is that the city theater does not have a fence and the paved area around it is located in Daneshjoo Park, next to Valiasr Street, and is considered a part of the complex where unique street performances are held from time to time. The tiling of this building was done by the brothers known as Kashipez, or Nahvipour brothers.
Although the city theater was originally designed to be performed only in the main hall, there are now five active halls: 1. The main hall with a capacity of 579 people; 2. Chaharsoo Hall with a capacity of 120 to 400 people; 3. Qashqai Studies Center; 4. Shadow Hall; 5. Plateau; In addition, two other halls, called Small Hall and Hall No. 2, have been built in the city theater, which is inactive due to repairs. The main hall cafeteria and the Chaharsoo hall cafeteria are also places for performances or plays.
This beautiful complex is unique in terms of access facilities, due to its convenient location in the city structure. On the other hand, the existence of the University of Arts and Amirkabir University on the north side of this axis, the University of Tehran and the Faculty of Architecture of the Azad University on the west side, and many scientific and artistic schools next to cinemas, bookstores, galleries and similar places in this area has made it the cultural center of Tehran. It hosts a large number of students, artists, art lovers and lovers of science and culture every day. Also, due to the security of the region, being crowded and well-known and the existence of a collective memory of old Tehran, this part of the city draws the public to the streets even at night.
The city theater complex operates after the Iranian revolution, under the supervision of the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance under the management of the Director General of Performing Arts. Access to the city theater is very easy and those interested can get to this point anywhere in the city by high-speed buses and metro.