An art student has proposed a plan to restore the Palace of Ardashir, also known as Firouzabad Palace, in Fars Province. Rakhshandeh Kazemi, a graduate student at Tehran University’s College of Fine Arts who dedicated her thesis to studying the famous historical site and devising a plan to restore it, has come up with a comprehensive method to save the palace from further erosion and degradation, Mehr News Agency reported. She proposes methods that would slow down, and in some cases mitigate, the effects of erosion, a natural process, without drastically changing the site’s physical features. The proposal is especially significant because in spite of the site’s importance to historians and architects, severe mismanagement and years of negligence have left the palace in a state of disrepair. Made entirely of stone, the Sassanid-era palace is named after the founder of the dynasty, Ardashir I (180- 242 AD). Aside from its historical value, the palace, particularly its structural design, is believed to have heavily influenced Iranian architecture in the following centuries.
