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.
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My company ArtWeLove.com did a roundup of works by Moussavi last week...
http://artwelove.com/news/archives/2009/06/18/awl-discovery-mir-hossein-mousavi-painter-architect-and-iranian-opposition-leader/
Fascinating! Although, it is important to not romanticize Moussavi. Architecture was a side project for a true political insider.
http://blogs.cqpolitics.com/spytalk/2009/06/mousavi-celebrated-in-iranian.html#more
Why do people have the need to paint these black and white pictures? If Ahmadinejad is bad, Mousavi must be good? Granted, he's less hopping mad than Ahmadinejad, but that, in itself, is not saying much.
How less fetishising and more investigating of his political persona?
That's nothing, pragmatic hard-liner Ali Larijani is a philosopher (wrote books on Kant) with a degree in computer science.