I met him for the last time at an architectural gathering — one of those evenings where the profession assembles to commemorate itself, where the speeches run long and the food arrives late and everyone is simultaneously present and somewhere else. He was in a corner, slightly apart from the crowd, with the particular stillness that I had always associated with him: not remoteness exactly, but a quality of full attention directed inward, as though the exterior world were being continuously weighed against some interior standard.
He was eighty-four years old. He moved carefully. But when he spoke — when someone approached him with a question, or when the conversation in his corner turned to something that interested him — the voice was unchanged. Precise. Unhurried. Capable of formulating in a single sentence what others would circle around for a paragraph.
I had known him, in the way that younger architects know the figures they admire, for more than twenty years. I had attended his lectures, visited his buildings, read his occasional writings. I had heard the stories that circulate about him in the profession — about his insistence on structural honesty, about his impatience with formal ornament, about the long silences he maintained in the face of questions he considered insufficiently serious. He was, by most accounts, difficult. He was also, by the same accounts, irreplaceable.
What I had not fully understood, until that last evening, was how much he had thought about failure — not his own, but the general failure of Iranian architecture to sustain the conversation it had begun so promisingly in the 1950s and 1960s. He was not bitter about this. Bitterness would have required a sense of personal injury, and he seemed genuinely indifferent to recognition. But he was troubled — quietly, persistently troubled — by what had been lost, and by the question of whether it could be recovered.
"Architecture is not a style," he said to me that evening, in the context of a longer conversation about the direction of contemporary practice. "It is a discipline. A way of thinking about space and structure and the human body moving through both. When you lose the discipline, you lose everything. Styles can be revived. Discipline, once lost, takes a generation to rebuild."
He died on the second of Esfand, 1401. He was eighty-five years old. His buildings remain. They are, I think, more patient than we are — more confident in their capacity to wait until we have eyes to see them properly.
Mr. Architect: very far now, and yet, in the buildings you left behind, very near.
Published 18 Esfand 1401