The man behind Iran's most famous tower

Azadi Tower, Tehran. Courtesy Mazyar َAsadi

by Rozita Riazati, BBC World Service

For 45 years, Iran's most famous modern monument, the Azadi (Freedom) Tower in Tehran, has been the backdrop to every major news story coming out of the country.

A plaza for celebrations, anniversaries, military parades and a gathering point for mass demonstrations, the 50m (165ft) tall tower has overlooked some of Iran's most important political events.

The edifice was built in 1971, to represent a symbol of modernity and project the way forward for Iran.

Even at the time the project was finished, architect Hossein Amanat never expected that "it would become such an icon, so popular with the people of Iran".

Originally named the King's Memorial, or Shahyad, it was commissioned to mark 2,500 years of the Persian Empire, celebrating the richness of Persian history and culture.

Hossein Amanat was a rising star in Iran's architectural scene when, in 1966, he won a national competition to design the monument.

The Design Poet

From Tehran to New York and now Dubai, Iranian artist Shirin Ehya talks to Rima Alsammarae about how jasmine trees and crisp autumn nights inspired her first furniture collection, Isfahan.

Diyar (bench) by Iranian designer Shirin Ehya, 2013, 130 x 40 x 45 cm. Description: This very sleek and elegant bench has been manufactured from wood and Persian toreutics on copper (ghalam) with high gloss lacquer finish. The intricate metal works have been carried out by a master coppersmith in Isfahan under the supervision of Shirin Ehya. Courtesy J+A Gallery.

by Rima Alsammarae, DesignMENA

Born in Tehran in 1984, it would be 18 years until Shirin Ehya left her country to study in the United States at the renowned Interior Designers Institute in America. Upon graduation, she was offered the opportunity to work with the Design Bureau of Tony Chi & Associates in New York, where she would spend the following several years working on projects around the world from New York, to China, to Australia.

In 2010, Ehya left New York and returned to Iran, where she began working on various retail projects. Upon her return after a long hiatus, she immersed herself in Iranian culture and found herself attracted to the sweet balance between contrasts commonly found in Iranian art.

It wasn’t long until she formed her first furniture collection, which happened organically rather than as a planned step forward.

Isfahan, named after the artistically driven town of its namesake, is a collection of contemporary furniture pieces that infuse subtle elements of Iranian culture. Available at J+A Gallery in Dubai, the Isfahan collection is powerful, dynamic and artistic.

With so many contemporary designers and artists attempting to fuse juxtaposing cultures into their designs, we wondered how Ehya managed to do so seamlessly.

Raised in Iran with a western education provides an interesting backdrop to approaching the designer’s work. And when it comes to Ehya, it seems we must go to the way, way back if we want to know her story, because as she thinks of her childhood, Ehya’s face grows into an undeniable smile. It’s a childhood filled with scents and colourful visions.

'Art doesn't have a border'

The artist, Hadi Hazavei, discusses freedom, growing up with cows and responsibilities that limit art

Hadi Hazavei’s brick structure: crude organisms and formal abstractions. Courtesy Shirin Gallery.

by Tara Aghdashloo, Tehran Bureau, Guardian

An exhibition of 49 works by Hadi Hazavei at New York City’s Shirin Gallery shows the artist’s material range and conceptual progression. An array of colours, lines, and layers come together in his older series, while his fingertips and palms have left their imprints amid the chaotic aesthetics of his more recent pieces. One wall is filled with minimalist geometric sketches reminiscent of glassworks from his Iranian homeland.

Hazavei’s oeuvre revolves around the duality of crude organisms and formal abstractions. This interplay is evident more confidently than ever in his new brick sculptures, a series both primal and prim. The bricks – some of them from around his current home in New Jersey – seem to hover, dancing in different directions. Some, around 150 years old, appear on the verge of crumbling, highlighting the artist’s fascination with the tension between organic and inorganic processes. He describes them as self-portraits.

TA: So tell me about this exhibition and how the works were chosen.

HH: Some of the works you see in this exhibition are from 1982, but most are from 2005 onwards. The brick works are from 2011 and 2012.

TA: Where did these bricks come from?

HH: Historically brick was the most fundamental unit in Iranian and Middle Eastern architecture and buildings. At some point clay was heated and made into bricks. As early as the time of the Achaemenian dynasty, they used bricks that were 30cm or 50cm thick. These were glazed, had 3D designs on them, with abstract natural figures; you can see examples of this in Persepolis – such as [the carvings of] soldiers, which are a masterpiece in colour and execution ...

I wanted to get to the foundation of it. Like how the foundation of the rug is the knot, bricks are architecture’s foundation.

TA: Have you had a deep interest in and attraction to architecture?

HH: Always. You know art doesn’t have a border. Painting, architecture, music, poetry, literature, and visual arts in general ... they are all summarised in one concept and that is the spiritual expression of people, articulated through different forms and mediums. Yet architecture has an additional function, which is that we live in it. It’s a space that we try to be happy yet also physically active in.

I took the purpose of the brick from that simple foundation of buildings and changed it to my own artistic expression. When I look at a brick, it is sitting there, all dignified, polite and proper, like how our parents always ask us to be! And I hate all these words ... Some suggest the same words to describe works of art. They want art to follow certain national traditions or to be “honest.” These are stupid responsibilities that limit art.

Persian Influences and Women in Architecture

Gisue Hariri (R) and Mojgan Hariri (L), sisters and co-founders of Hariri & Hariri. Photo Courtesy Asia Society (Karin Kohlberg). 

Interview by Clara Lambert, Asia Society

In the male-dominated field of architecture, Gisue Hariri and Mojgan Hariri have been a complementary force for over 20 years, pushing the boundaries of modern and technically inspired design. The Iran-born sisters came to America and studied architecture at Cornell University in the 1970's. Together they established their New York firm Hariri & Hariri in 1986. They have expanded and redefined the standard definition of architecture by a holistic approach in designing, masterplans, buildings, interiors, furniture, products and, more recently, jewelry and accessories.

The Hariris are often cited as innovators of cutting-edge materials and digital technology that are integrated into futuristic yet organic designs, from luxury residences like the iconic Sagaponac House in Long Island, New York to large-scale multi-use projects like the Sternbrauerei in Salzburg, Austria, which is currently in construction. Their work has been shown at the MOMA, National Building Museum, and the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art, among other institutions. 

Here, Gisue shares with Asia Society their family experiences, Persian influences, meaningful inspirations and insight.

Before coming to the U.S. for college, you were born and raised in Iran. How did your family and upbringing affect who or where you are today? Was there a cumulative or specific turning point when you realized you wanted to pursue architecture and come to America?

My sister and I are one and a half years apart and grew up in a small Iranian town in the south, attending public schools early on as my father's profession required that we live far in the desert near the oil fields. The desert became both deeply isolating and nurturing. Isolation encouraged our imagination to run wild and develop ideas that a more conventional childhood would have found odd, and we often had to invent our own world, toys and games.

Mirror, mirror

The Iranian artist Monir Farmanfarmaian's dazzling work shines in Dubai

Breaking the Waves, 2008, Mirror and reverse glass, 135 x 86 cm, by Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian. Courtesy The Third Line Gallery

by Anna Seaman, The National

In twinkling tones over a crackling line from Tehran, Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian smiles almost audibly as she talks about mirrors. "Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the prettiest of them all," she lilts. It is no wonder she lights up on the subject: mirror mosaic forms the basis of her work and it is through large installation works such as Flight of the Dolphin, part of the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art, and Lightning for Neda, six panels that hang in the Queensland Art Gallery in Brisbane, Australia, that this octogenarian has gained international recognition.

As the story goes, it was upon stepping into the shrine of Shah Cheragh in Shiraz in 1966 that Farmanfarmaian had her artistic epiphany. She saw the mirrors, which Iranian kings used to put inside the palaces for their wives (sometimes 20 to 30 in number) to see themselves and to feel less constricted by the walls, and described it as a living theatre. From then on she began her decades-long fascination with mirrors.

"The mirror is so old; in Iran we used them 3,500 years ago," she says. "But they were often broken, so craftsmen would put them together piece by piece in geometric shapes. Together they make a beautiful reflection."

Restoring Iran’s Heritage of Magnificent Homes in an Age of High Rises

The largest restored palace in Kashan has several courtyards and is a tourist attraction. Photo by Newsha Tavakolian, courtesy of  The New York Times.

by Thomas Erdbrink, NYTimes

A petite woman in gray boots and a checkered scarf, Shanaz Nader had spent much of her adult life abroad, with long stretches in Tokyo, London and New York. But here she was braving a cold wind in this desert city three hours south of Tehran, making her way through a maze of high mud-brick walls.

Black-clad women waited at a small bakery as the rattling noise of a motorcycle in the distance echoed through the alleys. Finally, Mrs. Nader, an interior designer in Tehran, reached her destination: a large, two-panel wood door that opened up to her fully renovated weekend home, a majestic old Iranian house with four bedrooms, colored-glass windows, a separate office, two garden areas and a large rectangular marble fountain. 

After boiling tea, Mrs. Nader, 68, sighed and sat down under an arched passageway. The sun reflected in the fountain, as the wind blew in faint sounds of the midday call to prayer. 

“Whenever I dreamed of Iran while being in some faraway place, I dreamed of owning such a house,” she said. 

For thousands of years, houses with secluded gardens and courtyards have been a cornerstone of Iranian architecture, which strongly influenced structures like the Alhambra and the Taj Mahal. Similar dwellings are described in literature from Achaemenid times, around 700 B.C., and their old Persian name is the root for the word “paradise.”

MesoCity Tehran Workshop: Art, Ecology and the City

Photo courtesy of Tavoos

by  Sara Kamalvand, Universe in Universe

Tehran is the biggest city between Istanbul and Mumbai, a city of 13 million in the desert. Like all other cities in Iran it was positioned strategically at the foot of a mountain in order to source water. But all this is forgotten today, and the urban sprawl has come to erase the memory of the underground water irrigation network: the qanat. It isn’t surprising that this organic water infrastructure was disregarded in the sixties when models of western modernization were pasted for the growth of Central-Asia’s capital. But today’s numbers are shocking: over six hundred abandoned underground galleries flush two hundred million cubic liters of wasted water annually.

HydroCity, an international research lab at the intersection of art, ecology and the city recently led a workshop on Tehran’s qanats at the University of Tehran, School of Architecture. HydroCity has a mandate to offer visionary proposals for real time challenges. The workshop was in partnership with Paris’s Ecole Spéciale d’Architecture, through French philosopher Chris Younès’s Sustainable Development Project for Cities program. The question wasn’t how to re-vive Tehran’s qanats in their traditional form, but to imagine what place this infrastructure can play in a contemporary context.

Iran is a desert but with mountains, a condition that allowed the Iranian civilization to invent the qanat, an ancestral underground irrigation infrastructure that led to the invention of the garden and by extension the city. The qanat directs water from the underground aquifers deposited at the foothill of a mountain by infiltration of melted snow. Seventy percent of all cities in Iran are thus by a mountain. Imitating the movements of water on soil, an underground gallery is dug directly in the bedrock, with a well every twenty or so meter. So the qanat is basically an invisible line punctuated by dots. Relying purely on gravity, the natural slope of the ground is used to distribute fresh water to lower sources. When it makes surface, the water is generally distributed in the city through a network of open-air canals. In fact in Tehran, the historic city starts exactly where the qanats end, where the water makes surface.