Hooshang Seyhoun

Biography

Over the grave of Avicenna in Hamadan stand twelve columns that converge towards the top and are bound by a dome; by design they stand for the twelve sciences the scholar commanded. The monument was built in 1952 to the design of Hooshang Seyhoun, who was then just past thirty.

He was born on 22 August 1920 in Tehran, into a family of musicians. His grandfather, Mirza Abdollah Farahani, is counted among the founders of the modern tradition of Iranian classical music; his mother, Mowloud Khanom, played the setar, and his uncle Ahmad Ebadi was an acknowledged master of that instrument. Seyhoun studied architecture at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Tehran under the Frenchmen André Godard and Maxime Siroux; of the three design studios he chose Siroux’s, explaining the choice by Siroux’s attachment to Iran. By the end of his studies he already had competition wins for the mausoleums of Ferdowsi and Ibn Sina behind him. At Godard’s invitation he went to Paris, to the École des Beaux-Arts, and in 1948 finished there with the diploma project “The Mausoleum of Avicenna at Hamadan”; three years of study under Othello Zavaroni brought him a doctorate in art.

Fame came with the buildings of the 1950s: Tehran’s central railway station, the tombs of poets and scholars. Hamadan was followed by the Omar Khayyam Mausoleum in Nishapur and the Tomb of Nader Shah in Mashhad. In these works he sought a union of functionalism with the motifs of medieval Iranian ornament and epigraphy; a good architect, he said, must, like a poet, be simple and easy. There were private commissions too, by some counts more than a thousand villas.

In 1961 he succeeded Mohsen Foroughi as dean of the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Tehran and held the post for six years. Under him the history of Iranian architecture entered the curriculum; he took students around the country to look at old buildings, and out of these trips, together with the antiquities department, came lists of neglected structures that were given the status of historic monuments. He sat on the National Committee of Archaeology, the High Committee of Urbanization, the central committee of Iran’s universities and the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), and for fifteen years he was in charge of the restoration of the country’s historic buildings. He drew and painted alongside his architecture, but as an artist he is far less known, and about the fate of those works I can say only what he himself asked in his will.

After the revolution of 1979 Seyhoun left for Vancouver and never returned to Iran.

He died on 26 May 2014. He was buried at Forest Lawn cemetery in Los Angeles; the body was wrapped in the old tricolour flag of Iran with the lion and sun and in the Derafsh Kaviani, the banner from the Iranian epic. In his will he asked that all his paintings and drawings be given to a museum in Iran.