Today we face dual humanitarian crises: ancient monuments are crumbling, while water shortages threaten human survival. On the one hand, the effects of global warming place vast populations out of reach of fresh drinking water. On the other hand, advanced late-stage capitalism continues to propagate models of urban sprawl that do not value architectural heritage. This research expands the canon of architectural history to study a little-known water infrastructure that has come to define some Persian desert cities. Yazd is a city in the arid central plateau of present-day Iran that was built around a water source in the Shirkuh mountain range. This water source established Yazd as an important stop on an ancient trade route, the secondary branch of the Silk Road. Water structures and facilities, including ab-anbars (cisterns for local water access), located on qanats (elaborate underground canals that guided the city’s development), channel water from nearby mountains, utilizing extraordinary cooling towers that punctuate the urban skyline and act as social hubs for local communities. This research considers the contemporary water crisis of Yazd to bring attention to the forces that allowed these ancient water structures to shape the city both historically and today after losing their initial function. In particular, the following pages focus on cisterns as an architectural typology. The implication is that cisterns comprise a generic architectural form that is bound to the public space and public buildings of the city. Using analytical drawings, the research aims to identify the significance of a building type in forming the city. Such typologies are of particular value for discussing both a building’s singleness and shared features. In other words, this research is an investigation concerned not only with the forms of buildings, but also with the external forces that shape those buildings. As such, the cisterns act like a grammar for a city whose history is shaped by water and architecture
