.هـوشنــگ سیحــون

             1299-1393

Houshang Seyhoun

Works and Activities of Hooshang Seyhoun

Over the course of two decades,  Hooshang Seyhoun continued to create distinctive and remarkable architectural works. Among the most notable are:

Tomb of Sheikh al-Ra’is Abu Ali Sina (Avicenna), Hamadan (1954 / 1333 SH)
Private residence and studio of Hooshang Seyhoun, Tehran, Jomhouri Avenue (1954 / 1333 SH)
The Wall of Modernity, Dr. Mohsen Moqaddam Residence, Sepah Street, Tehran (1954 / 1333 SH)
Canada Dry Factory, Tehran, Azadi Street (1954 / 1333 SH)
Villa of David Khanian, Tehran (1958 / 1337 SH)
Residence of Mr. Kazemi, Tehran (1958 / 1337 SH)
Tomb of Sheikh Farid al-Din Attar, Neyshabur (1958 / 1337 SH)
Mausoleum and historical complex of Nader Shah Afshar, Mashhad (1961 / 1340 SH)
Tomb of Kamal-ol-Molok, Neyshabur (1961 / 1340 SH)
Tomb of Omar Khayyam, Neyshabur (1961 / 1340 SH)
Headquarters of Bank Sepah, Tehran (1962 / 1341 SH)
Private residence of Hooshang Seyhoun, Tehran (1962 / 1341 SH)
Restoration of the Tomb of Ferdowsi and design of the museum, restaurant, and surrounding gardens, Tus, Mashhad (1969 / 1348 SH)
Dowlatabadi House, Niavaran, Tehran (1969 / 1348 SH)
Design for Yazd Cultural Center (1971 / 1350 SH)
Bazaar of Amir Chakhmaq, Yazd (1973 / 1352 SH)
Shariati (formerly Farah) Girls’ Educational Complex, Tehran (1970 / 1349 SH)
Summer residence of Hooshang Seyhoun, Fasham (1974 / 1353 SH)

He also designed and built:

Office building of the Tehran Power Center
Headquarters of the National Cartography Organization, Karaj Road
Orphanage
Dr. Moqaddam Building, Tehran
Fire Department headquarters and dormitory, Tehran
Library of the National Consultative Assembly (later Islamic Consultative Assembly), in collaboration with Mohsen Foroughi, Keyqobad Zafar Bakhtiar, and Ali Sadegh
Asia Cinema, Tehran
Central Cinema, Tehran
Residential building, Taleghani Street, Tehran
Academic and Professional Contributions

Member of the Society for National Heritage, where he contributed to the design and supervision of numerous restoration and memorial projects.
Organized lectures and academic exchanges by inviting world-renowned modern architects such as Alvar Aalto and Richard Neutra to Iran, raising the intellectual and professional standards of architecture students at the Faculty of Fine Arts.
Led student field trips to acquaint them with the grandeur of Persian historical architecture, and directed surveys, measured drawings (relève), and documentation of Iran’s architectural heritage.
Collaborated with leading Iranian architects to assist Abdolhamid Eshraq, editor-in-chief of Honar va Memari (Art and Architecture Quarterly), in organizing two major International Congresses of Architecture:

Isfahan (1969 / 1348 SH)
Shiraz (1974 / 1353 SH)

These events brought to Iran international masters such as Louis Kahn, Ralph Erskine, and others.

Delivered lectures in Iran, Europe, and North America, and held numerous workshops and seminars.

Hooshang Seyhoun

Childhood and Early Life of Hooshang Seyhoun

When Hooshang Seyhoun was born, carriages and horse-drawn coaches were still the main means of transport in Tehran, and the atmosphere of the city was utterly different from today. The streets were unpaved, houses were built with clay bricks, and electricity had not yet arrived—no streetlamps lit the nights, which were steeped in total darkness. People relied on small oil lamps and pi-suz burners. Water reached the city through qanats and streams from the outskirts of Tehran and was sold to households. It had been about a century since Tehran was proclaimed the capital. Shah Tahmasb of the Safavid dynasty, who had first chosen Qazvin as his seat of rule, would occasionally travel to the area for hunting and for pilgrimages to the shrine of his ancestor at Shah Abdol-Azim, eventually ordering walls and fortifications to be built there. At that time, Tehran was still a small village near the ancient city of Ray. It was under Agha Mohammad Khan Qajar, in 1786 (1200 SH), that Tehran officially became the capital, and in the reign of Naser al-Din Shah, “the Europeanized Shah,” numerous palaces were constructed. With the aid of a French engineer, a moat and fortifications were built around the city. As a child of five or six, Seyhoun would play with his neighbor and childhood companion, Mansour Hajian, in these very moats. When he was born in 1920 (1299 SH), Tehran—the Dar al-Khilafa—had fewer than 250,000 inhabitants. Today its population numbers in the tens of millions. Although Seyhoun’s early childhood lacked electricity and modern comforts, it unfolded during one of the most tumultuous social and political periods in Iranian history. The struggles of constitutionalists and despotic monarchs had yielded no decisive victories, while the global empires of the time—Russia, Britain, and France—roamed Iran more aggressively than ever, burdened with the anxieties left by the First World War. In 1919, the Treaty of Versailles had officially ended the conflict, only a few years after Tsarist Russia had collapsed into the Soviet Union, still reeling from the Socialist Revolution and wartime wounds. Across Asia, millennia-old monarchies were falling: in China, nationalist and regional warlords vied for power while Mao Zedong presided over the first meetings of the Communist Party. In the Middle East, Iraq and Palestine had become unofficial British protectorates, while India remained its formal colony. Gandhi had just launched his non-cooperation movement to lead India toward independence. The Ottoman Empire, “the sick man of Europe,” had disintegrated: Syria was handed to France, while the remains of the empire formed modern Turkey, awaiting Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and the founding of the National Republican Party. In Iran, when Seyhoun was barely six months old, Reza Khan and Seyyed Zia al-Din Tabataba’i staged the coup of Esfand 1299 (1921), laying the groundwork for a centralized and authoritarian state. Fortune had placed Seyhoun in a literate, affluent, artistic, and progressive family. He later recalled his birthplace: “When I was born, Pasteur Street did not exist. It is an east–west street; if you started from its westernmost point and went east, you would eventually reach Pahlavi Avenue—though at that time it was just being laid out. When I was born, there was no Pahlavi Avenue yet, and Ahmad Shah was king of Iran, not Reza Shah. The year I was born was the very year Reza Khan staged his coup. At that time, Tehran was surrounded by moats, with twelve or thirteen gates built in the Qajar period. They were remarkable gates. One of Pahlavi’s greatest mistakes was demolishing them. General Bozorgmehr, the mayor at the time, destroyed them so that ‘nothing of the Qajars would remain.’ Yet these gates could have become iconic features of Tehran’s identity. The city did not have many ancient monuments; those thirteen gates should never have been torn down. The moats where I used to play were also filled in. ” He was born in a house near today’s Pasteur Street, in a quarter inhabited by Tehran’s elite. His father was not a prince or a government official, but a landowner who earned his living from urban rents and teaching music.

Seyhoun recalled: “My father also taught music. It wasn’t exactly for a livelihood, because he had built several apartments along the street which he rented out, and that income was sufficient for our family. Many others did the same—Bozorgmehr himself among them. Owning rental property was the best source of income in Tehran at the time. My father bought a 4,000-square-meter garden with a house, built in the style of the day: a south-facing veranda with all the rooms arranged around it. Below the veranda were the kitchen, storage, and utility rooms, with a staircase leading up to the main veranda and the rooms above. I spent my childhood in that house, and I remember it vividly in every detail. ” His neighbors included some of Tehran’s future dignitaries and statesmen: Amir Akram, Mirza Rezā Khan Afshar, the Azizi family, and General Morteza Khan Yazdanpanah, later a close advisor to Mohammad Reza Shah. Not far away lay Shah Street and its moat, where Seyhoun and his friend Mansour Hajian would play. He vividly remembered an incident from those days: “There was a rumor that a woman had been beheaded and thrown into the moat. Everyone went to see it, and I went too, with my father, I think. I still remember the sight clearly: the headless woman lying in the ditch.” The Seyhoun family were not among the tribal khans or great landowners, but they were wealthy enough from their urban properties to live comfortably and pursue artistic interests. His father supported his son’s passion for drawing, which began in early childhood: “From the age of four or five, I would constantly draw with charcoal on the walls of the house, driving my family to despair.” Art and music were deeply valued in the family. Seyhoun’s mother and maternal relatives were all musicians. He remembered being taken as a child to a recording session of Qamar al-Moluk Vaziri, the legendary singer: “It wasn’t really a studio—just a room in a house where the record was cut. I remember Qamar drinking a raw egg yolk before singing, saying it cleared her voice.” It was also in those years that the first black-and-white Charlie Chaplin films began to be shown in Tehran cinemas—early glimpses of the modern world that would shape the imagination of a young boy destined to become one of Iran’s most important architects.