Siah Armajani

Armajani, who belongs to the class of professors such as Parviz Tanavoli, Marko Grigorian, etc., although he is not very famous inside Iran, but he has a great reputation in the international arena. In one of his latest international successes, this Iranian artist won the $50,000 McKnight Foundation award, which is mainly given to artists with different expressions. The McKnight Foundation, which has been selecting and introducing different international artists to the world for five decades, usually selects artists whose works and views show leading trends. Researcher and art teacher Hamid Souri says about the works and importance of this artist: Siah Armajani is one of the most successful artists in Iran in the international arena. He added: Later, he became oriented towards public art and created his works of art in such a way that they are practical by being placed in the public space and people can use them and not only pay attention to the element of beauty in them. One of his most important works can be mentioned the creation of the architectural alphabet in a conceptual way. According to Suri; Armajani used Persian poetry and Iranian motifs in the sculptures and works he created during his career in Iran, and his works were very close to the Iranian cultural atmosphere. Later, he distanced himself from this space, and his work space changed by getting familiar with modern philosophy and paying attention to the general public. Siah Armajani is the designer of the 1996 Summer Olympic torch in Atlanta, Georgia, in the United States. In the Atalanta Olympic torch design, unlike previous times, Armajani took the torch out of the stadium and placed it in the public space. He believed: “In front of the many things we have taken from the people to hold the Olympics here, at least we can give them the torch.” After 40 years, he traveled to Iran in 2013 at the invitation of Alireza Samii Azar and gave a speech at the Museum of Contemporary Arts. Siah Armajani believes to restore beauty to applied arts and defines public art as follows:

Public art is not about the existence of an individual, it is about the existence of others. It’s not about personal tastes, it’s about other people’s needs. It’s not about the fear and hope of the artist, it’s about the joy and happiness of others. It is not about the legendary personality of the artist, it is about socialization of art.”

It is not intended to give people a sense of smallness and insignificance, it is intended to give people a sense of excellence and glory. It is not intended to create a distance between the sublime culture and the general public, it is intended to make art public and the artist one of the public. The word art in terms of public art does not refer to the presence of huge works of art in large urban squares, and of course it is not that which is framed and hung on the wall; Public art is that which is experienced by the public. Public art is not public art, as, for example, the art of Hitler’s Nazis and Stalin’s communists was public art. Public art is not a ladder interpretation of history, it is a horizontal interpretation of history.

Due to his deep attachment to philosophy, social sciences and history, Siah Armajani has been able to create strange and mysterious works. In 1982, he designed and built Louis Kahn’s speech classroom in Philadelphia. His works, which are often categorized under public art, are democratic, because they equate art with everyday life, his bridges, rooms and garden structures are simple and of course involved in details, although they are often illustrated with a paragraph of his favorite authors such as Whitman, Melville and Emerson. Louis Kahn’s speech class room is designed for 35 people, in the middle of the room he has freed up a space to crystallize the “meditative quality”, the body next to the room is organized in such a way that the image of Louis Kahn’s works can be installed on it and later moved around, an inscription has been installed in the room on which Louis Kahn’s famous phrase about the school has been quoted: “The first school started with a man who shared what he had under a tree with others who were sitting around him.” did, neither the man knew that he was a teacher, nor did the others know that they were students.” On the floor of the room, there is an annotation by Walt Whitman: “When the material is ready, the architecture is revealed.” The simple and spiritual elegance of the room reminds us of a Quaker church hall in the land of churches, Armajani has tried to transfer the feeling of the sanctuary that is located in the vicinity of the room to Louis Kahn’s speech classroom, a sanctuary that was originally a church. One of his works called “Written Minneapolis” is a 5-meter page full of Persian poetry. This work reflects his childhood and teenage memories in Tehran. He says that his mind is full of poems, many of which he memorized during school and wrote all of them on this 5-meter page. “Written Minneapolis” is Armajani’s own tomb. A sketch of the city of Minneapolis where he has been living for many years, plus hundreds of Persian poems that fill the space between the lines of the buildings. He believes that art should not be about him personally, that’s why he painted the view of his city on his tomb instead of his image. Among his works, we can mention “George Simmel Bridge” in Strasbourg, France (2003), “Mural” in Kansas City, USA (2001) and “Picnic Table for Huesca Bielsa” in Huesca, Spain (2000), and he has also done many other projects such as the Staten Island Tower and Bridge in New York, the Round Gazebo in Nice, France, and the Irene Hixon Whitney Bridge in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA. His works are in prestigious museums such as New York Metropolitan, New York Modern Art, Guggenheim, Chicago Art Institute, American National Gallery, British Museum and other European museums in Berlin, Amsterdam and Geneva.