THE FORMATION OF IRANIANS’ ARCHITECTURAL STYLE OF THE 9<sup>TH</sup>-11<sup>TH</sup> CENTURIES
The joining of the Iranian territories to the Caliphate was the event resulting in a transformation of a way of life, thinking and a local population’s perception of the outside world. These changes in mindset, in turn, led to a subsequent transformation of the artistic tastes and the formation of the distinctive stylistic features in architecture. There is therefore a need to identify the aforementioned changes in the spirit of the times, Zeitgeist. Islam has become a driving force to the transformation of Zeitgeist. The primary aim of this article is to outline the specific conditions for the emergence and formation of Iranian Islamic architecture in accordance with the contemporary theory of perception and principles of vision. The aim is accomplished through the application of the principles of conscious vision. The essence of the proposed method is that the result of the perception of a subject depends on three components. These are object, subject and the act of perception. In our case the Iranian artists of the 9th-11th centuries are the object, the artistic and architectural forms of the past of Iranians are the subject. This procedure demonstrates, therefore, the principle of the formation of artistic forms, based on the visual experience of Iranians. Hardly had the architects appealed to their traditional architectural forms when they transformed them in accordance with the new Islamic discourse, discourse of Zeitgeist. The study also revealed that the architectural style of the 9th-11th centuries is different from what came previously, by its very nature.