Joshua Foer is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. Joshua is a freelance science journalist and the co-founder of the Atlas Obscura: A Compendium of the World's Wonders, Curiosities, and Esoterica, with Dylan Thuras.
I wouldn't have ever guessed that there could be an Atlas Obscura angle on the Iran situation (the country's pigeon towers and salt-cured mummies
feel rather trivial at the moment), but then along comes this slide show put
together by the architecture critic James Gardner about Moussavi's life
as a practicing architect:
Over the past century, not a few powerful men, among them Churchill,
Eisenhower, and even Hitler, have fancied themselves painters and have
displayed at times a lively interest in architecture. What is different
about Mir-Hossein Moussavi, Iran's leading opposition candidate, is
that he has actually earned a living through these disciplines, and not
in his long ago youth, but as recently as this past year, just before
he sought the presidency of Iran.
Unfortunately, there seem to be very few online images of
Moussavi's most famous commission, the Iran Ministry of Energy building, and so the slide show is necessarily a bit speculative. The above photograph is of the Iran
Art Portico on Valiasr Street in Tehran, a Moussavi project completed just before the start of the presidential campaign.
