Hushang Seyhun, the internationally renowned Iranian architect who designed the mausoleums of Avicenna, Omar Khayyam, and Nader Shah, as well as numerous other highly-regarded public buildings and private homes across Iran, died this week at the age of 94.
Seyhun was a towering figure in the world of Iranian architecture, lecturing and exhibiting widely across the world and serving as dean of the University of Tehran’s School of Fine Arts and Architecture. He was responsible for reshaping the school's curriculum, making it dynamic and competitive on an international level.
Seyhun studied architecture in Paris, and his work was notable for its original and lyrical use of concrete, steel, and brick. A talented painter and illustrator, his artistic work was exhibited in Tehran before the 1979 revolution, after which he permanently left the country to reside first in Europe and then in North America.
The following extract, by Dr Abbas Milani, was originally published in Eminent Persians: The Men and Women Who Made Modern Iran (Syracuse University Press)
For some, art is a vocation; for others, an avocation. For a few, it is an existential exigency—not a means to an end but the end of all means, not a tool for survival but the very meaning for existence. Hushang Seyhun is this rare breed of men. He has lived in, for and through art all his life. His earliest memories of childhood are mingled with his attempts to draw. "As soon as I knew. who I was,” he said, "I knew I wanted to be an artist. It never occurred to me to be anything else”.
He was born in Tehran on August 22, 1920 (31 Mordad 1299) to a cultured family steeped in music. His father taught violin; his mother played the tar. Mirza Abdulllah, one of the most influential figures in the history of Persian music, was his grandfather, and Ebadi and Shahnazi, tar and sitar maestros, were his uncles. "I was raised with music in my ears,” he said.
He was about three when he discovered his passion for painting, and only a young boy when he decided he wanted to become an artist. Contrary to the common ethos of Persian families, who would usually try to dissuade their children from a life in the arts, they encouraged him to "follow his bliss."
He finished high school in Tehran. He was a good student, but his forte and preoccupation was painting. Fortune came to help when, after high school, he read an advertisement in one of Tehran’s daily newspapers for a new college of arts and architecture. IT was called Honarkadeh (house of the arts). Much to the consternation of the clergy, the new college was housed in what had been the storied Marvi Seminary. The college was the brainchild of the minister of culture, Esmail Merat, but it was the stern secularization policies of Reza Shah that allowed the government to evict the mullahs from the seminary and and put a modern art college in its place. Where mullahs once taught Shiite sharia, French professors now talked of Modigliani and modernism. The legendary Monsieur Andre Godard ran the school, and the language of instruction was French. Among the professors was the famed scholar and artist Maxim Seroux, the author of a classic study of caravansaries in Iran.
Seyhun stayed at the school for four years and earned a degree in architecture. During that time, the country had been undergoing important changes. In his second year, with the fall of Reza Shah, the mullahs, emboldened by Mohammad Reza Shah's conciliatory policies toward them, demanded their old seminary back. They got their wish, and the art college, left homeless, moved to the basement of the Faculty of Engineering in Tehran University.
This turmoil was part of the political upheaval in society at large. But it was of little interest to Seyhun. "Politics never interested me," he said, "I was happily preoccupied with art.” In a country in which intellectual discourse was saturated with politics, his apolitical disposition was a sign of his self-assured independence of mind. He was the school's top student and a favored protege of Godard. At the end of the war, the French government gave a handful of art and architecture scholarships to promising Iranian students, and Godard was put in charge of the selection process. Seyhun was one of the students he selected. (Jalil Ziapour, who went on to become a prominent painter, was another scholarship recipient.)
Seyhun had shown his precocious talent in a surprisingly large number of fields in the visual arts. He had experimented with abstract expressionism, calligraphy, and pencil drawings and had even pioneered a new technique of using felt to create artwork. He had won a number of prestigious awards and competitions. When the Iranian government decided to give a medal to commemorate the Tehran Conference, Seyhun, though still an undergraduate student at Honarkadeh, won the competition to design it. Four other medals given by the Ministry of Culture for outstanding service were also designed by him.
Even more impressive was Seyhun's success in winning two of the most important architectural competitions of the time. The Iranian Association of Historic Monuments decided to build a memorial to Ferdowsi, Iran's great epic poet. Seyhun won the award with a design that drew its inspiration from the classical monumentality of pre-Islamic Persian architecture. It was the harbinger of a paradigm change in Iranian aesthetic sensibility that was to bloom a full two decades later.
While he was a student at Honarkadeh, Seyhun won another competition, this time for a monument to Ibn Sina, known to the West as Avicenna, Iran's great Aristotelian philosopher of the late Middle Ages. Although Seyhun had won the French government scholarship, he was reluctant to go, for he was understandably bent on taking up the Ibn Sina project. But the funds for the project were not yet available.
Seyun ultimately went to Paris with his mentor's assurance that he would be brought back to Iran as soon as the Avicenna project was ready to commence. In Paris, embarking on his work at the college turned out to be more complicated than he had imagined. Although he had taken an architectural degree in Iran, the French authorities refused to accept any of his credits and insisted that Seyhun begin again as a freshman. He was disheartened and contemplated returning to Iran. But as often happened in his life, serendipity came to his aid. A competition for advanced students was announced at the school, and Seyhun, unbeknownst to the school authorities, entered. His design was recognized as one of the top 20. That success compelled the school to accept him at the advanced level. Moreover, Seyhun's experience established a precedent at the school that helped future Iranian students who went to the college.
In 1948, another piece of serendipity helped Seyhun. About the time he finished his course of study, he heard from Godard that the necessary funds for the lbn Sina monument had finally been procured. He returned to Iran and immediately established his own firm. While completing the memorial, he also began accepting private commissions. He designed a small clinic for Dr. Farhad, one of Tehran's eminent physicians of the time, for example. At the same time, Godard, who was now the Dean of Tehran University's College of Art and Architecture, invited Seyhun to join the faculty, thus beginning Seyhun's long and distinguished academic career. In November 2005, about a hundred of his students from all over the world organized an evening in Dubai to celebrate Seyhun's more than 50 years of teaching and mentoring.
Seyhun's most important contribution as an artist, architect, and teacher, was his role in the emergence of a new kind of cultural and aesthetic modernity in Iran. In the mid-twentieth century, as trained architects began to arrive in Iran, they designed buildings that emulated in their fundamental architectural language the work of Western architects. Whether they trained in France and followed the Beaux-Arts tradition, or in America, where they were inspired by the likes of Frank Lloyd Wright or Philip Johnson, the impulse to imitate the West was the same.
This emulation of Western styles of modernism was not limited to architecture. The first generation of Persian modernist painters were hardly distinguishable in style from their German, French, or Spanish counterparts. These early Iranian advocates of modernity essentially copied the Western masters because they believed there was nothing redeemable in Iranian tradition, and that only by emulating and accepting Western values and forms could a bright future come to Iran.
But by the late 1950s, in nearly every aesthetic domain—from the theory of the novel to painting and architecture—a new vision of modernity began to emerge. A new paradigm of the past, which wanted to appropriate what was useful from the past while discarding the anachronistic, began to emerge. Iranian modernity, according this paradigm, could only come from Iranian tradition. Artists and architects, as well as writers and poets—from Hoseyn Zenderudi and M. Reza Moghtader to Ebrahim Golestan and Hushang Golshiri—began to experiment with new forms of modernism that absorbed, while critically changing, all that was aesthetically, formally, and philosophically part of the Iranian tradition. In the field of architecture, Seyhun was one of the central figures in this historic transition.
In 1961, he replaced Mohsen Forughi as the dean of the College of Art and Architecture at Tehran University. His tenure lasted seven years. He used the perod to bring about important changes in the curriculum of the college. One of bis favorite subjects was traditional Iranian architecture; he taught a class on the subject. His lectures, as well as his drawings of great buildings, were published m French and Persian. In his own mind, his most important contribution to architecture was to inaugurate the practice of requiring all students at the university to travel throughout Iran and visit old and new buildings in villages and towns, marking grand monuments of the past as well as the simple adobe structures of the poor. He bought a special bus for these trips and often accompanied the students on their journeys of discovery. After the first year, he also invited an official of Iran’s Department of Antiquities, and as a result, man important but hitherto ignored buildings were placed on the list of historic sites and marked for preservation. The fact that Queen Farah had been a student of architecture and had developed an avid interest in preserving historic sites was of enormous help to Seyhun. The student were asked to draw architectural sketches of each site, and these drawings were archived in the Antiquities Department.
While Seyhun continued his teaching a n d pursued his work at the architectural firm—designing at least 150 private homes, two cinemas, several factories, and many other buildings—he was also active as a painter. By the mid-1970s, he had achieved an international reputation, and his works have been shown in Iran and around the world—including an exhibit at the University of Massachusetts, where his paintings hung alongside those of Picasso and Dali.
One of his most acclaimed exhibits took place in Tehran, at the lran-American Society. Called “LInes in Nature and Imagination,” it included drafts of his architectural designs, as well as his pencil sketches. He also experimented with a new form in which elaborate designs were built from a multitude of simple fine lines—a sort of two-dimensional, black-and-white pointillism. Whether designing pottery or painting a bird, he combined traditional motifs with innovations in form.
Not only was his art vocation and avocation, but his private emotional life was also inseparable from the world of art. In 1952, he married M'asoume Nousheen. She was an accomplished painter herself. She went on to establish the Seyhun Gallery, and for almost three decades the gallery remained one of the preeminent houses for exhibiting modern art in Iran. With his work as an archiect and an artist of myriad accomplishments, and with her paintings and gallery, the name Seyhun came to conjure modernism and a refined aesthetic in the mind of the urbane Iranian.
The revolution forced Seyhun into a life of exile. He moved to Vancouver, Canada, where he continued to paint, draw, design, lecture, and write. In 1989, the city of Los Angeles recognized his service as a "father of urban modernism." Alhthough he nostalgically recalled times past, he had, he said, no desire to see an Iran debased by obscurantism. "The land I knew and loved," he said wistfully, "has fallen prey to the revolution". But at home or in exile, he always lived in his art. In his later years, images of the past—copies of his painting, photos of his buildings—nourished his nostalgia for the land he loved and lost.
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