Noureddin Kianouri (Persian: نورالدین کیانوری; 1915–1999) was an Iranian construction engineer, Urban planner Professor of Bauakademie der DDR in Berlin[1][2][3][4] and a communist political leader.

He fled, and lived in Italy and later East Germany; under the pseudonym "Dr. Silvio Macetti" he was an influential architect and theorist of socialist architecture and city planning.

In the early 1940s he married feminist and communist activist Maryam Firouz daughter of Abdol-Hossein Farman Farma; at the time he taught structure at Tehran University.

Besides their political activities in the form of demonstrations and gatherings, they set out to train and educate the public, specifically the working and middle classes.

In the first issue of the Architect journal (from August 1946), Abbas Ajdari outlined the mission of the association in the article “The Problem of Housing in Tehran, and other Cities”.

The new neighbourhoods were all planned according to the modernist principles of hygienic facilities, sufficient daylight, clean water supply, and vehicular accessibility.

Following the ideas propounded by Kianouri's Socialist visionary architecture, most of these housing projects were equipped with communal spaces at both the block and neighbourhood scales, where meetings, social exchange, and political gatherings and demonstrations could take place.

However, owing to a lack of financial support and sufficient executive power to be able to afford and introduce such technologies for large-scale blocks, the Association of Iranian Architects decided to develop the projects with low-tech construction and low-cost building materials and techniques.

The plan of the dwelling units was reduced to a bare minimum of spaces, series of bedrooms with almost no living room or spacious kitchen, as used to be the case in traditional Iranian houses.

The projects were provided with day-care centres, public laundry facilities, and, of course, community spaces most of which were later converted to Tudeh Party clubs.

This [new] form of living must comply with the requirements of our time and the socioeconomic performance of the space in order to foster a high degree of socialization in household tasks.

In 1955 two years after the coup 1953 Kianouri ran away from Iran to Iraq and further to Italy communist Party he was given a new identity as Dr. Silvio Macetti.

In the Soviet Union and East Germany more than others he worked with Josef Kaiser, Bruno Flierl and Georgy A. Gradov (Градов, Георгий Александрович), also an architect and an urban planner.

He continued that collaboration after moving to East Berlin, where he became a research director of the Bauakademie der DDR [de] (DBA), developing theories of socialist architecture and urban planning and cooperating with Gradov.

According to Hamed Khosravi, it is not easy to assess how much practical impact their theoretical work had, but it was clear what the essence of the work was: "For Macetti the key to make any social and political change in the society lied in the question of domestic space", less about fulfilling individual necessities, desires, and needs", and more about "the collective mobilization of those lives through maximization of the communal facilities and minimization of the living units to the bare essential infrastructures.

Thus, it is difficult to evaluate to what extent such a theoretical project was actually implemented and promoted by the two institutions in planning new settlements and developing architectural typologies for minimum unit and mass housing.

Living no longer takes place in isolated homes, but rather in an active encounter with the associated communities and their facilities (city)….The habitation factors and the material-technical and cultural backwardness of the capitalist past are overcome fundamentally.…:House should be a space for a meaningful life, for the economy of the time, for reaching a higher cultural level, for better working and living conditions, for emancipation of the woman, for better conditions for the care and education of the children; These are considered by many outstanding architects of the capitalist world as well, and are taken up in their works to fulfil them progressively.

[23] Kianouri, interviewed for Newsweek, expressed the party's view that it should work with Ruhollah Khomeini, and that "he is playing a totally progressive part in the development of Iran".

[25] A series of mass arrests followed, including that of Kianouri and his wife;[26][27] the Tudeh Party was again banned, accused of espionage for the Soviet Union.

[28] In February 1983, Kianouri and his wife were imprisoned[11] and later forced to publicly confess on a televised broadcast[29] at the height of the persecution of communists in Iran.

[30] The public confession happened in May 1983, when Kianouri and Behazin, a well-known writer and translator and member of the Tudeh party, appeared on national television, each giving a recantation that was a kind of "history lesson", in which they outlined how communism had betrayed the people of Iran.

Kianouri mentioned how he had come to realize that communism was essentially alien to the people of Iran, and that the party was plagued by private jealousies and corruption.

[12] (In 1995, he testified to the United Nations Human Rights Commission, denouncing "the torture and other inhumane practices carried out in the Islamic Republic's prisons".

[31]) His wife, who had fallen ill during solitary confinement, was released on medical ground and placed under house arrest; he joined her a year later, on the condition that he remain quiet to the media.