Fereydoun Amir Moezzi
Fereydoun Amir Moezzi was born in Tehran in l944. He attended elementary school at the French Lycee Saint Louis and continued in Tehran's Alborz high school. He then enrolled in the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux Arts in Paris, an excellent school that was infamously out of step with the educational philosophies of modern architecture.
Feeling disappointment with the antiquated system at the Beaux Arts he returned to the University of Tehran and earned his Master's of Architecture with high honors and was awarded the first ranked Imperial Medal from the university. From earliest childhood Fereydoun had a passion for drawing and painting, but it was during his studies at the University of Tehran that he was finally able to combine these passions with the study of architecture by accompanying his professor and Dean of the school, Mr. Houshang Seyhoun, on drawing trips throughout the country.
Fereydoun continued post graduate education in the United States at Washington University School of Architecture in St. Louis, Missouri. As Director of the Master's of Architecture and Urban Design program, I was his advisor for his completion of this degree.
Shortly after graduation Fereydoun joined the firm of SRTA International, Architects and Planners of which I was a principal with offices in St. Louis and Tehran. We worked in association with H. Seyhoun & Partners on several large scale projects in Iran, including the Mobarak Abad Resort Village in Ab Ali and the Menjan New Town in Isfahan, both of which were interrupted by the Iranian revolution. Following this the firm of Royse/Moezzi/Mazetis was established in San Francisco and several projects were completed including the Woodcreek Village Public Housing project in Santa Rosa which received awards from the California Housing Finance Agency and the Governor of California.
In 1984 Fereydoun began work as an architect in the public sector and served for 26 years as a registered architect for the city of San Jose, California. He designed, managed and participated in several municipal projects ranging from a large scale arena seating 20,000 people and a multimodal transportation terminal to medium and smaller scale museums, community centers, fire and police stations. During these years he received several awards from the mayor and other public officials in recognition of his work. Prior to retirement in 2010, he was the senior architect and urban designer leading a team of architects and design professionals for the city of San Jose.
Since retirement from professional architectural demands, Fereydoun has been able to return to his earlier passions of drawing and painting and rekindle the social and cultural images that were an important part of his earlier experiences. The field trips with Prof. Houshang Seyhoun and other students at the University of Tehran to record sketches or graphic notes, "croquis", which included urban, rural and village imagery started the creative understandings which are represented in the watercolor drawings of the current show. In those trips he became intimately familiar with a very diverse Iranian environment through careful observation and documentation of the people and landscape that was uniquely Persian.
In 2010 Fereydoun's old sketches titled "Iran de Jadis" were displayed in the gallery Le Magoarou in Paris. In 2011 a few of his drawings along with the collective works of 10 former students of Mr. H. Seyhoun, as well as some of Seyhoun's works, were shown in the Seyhoun Gallery in Los Angeles.
It is works from the past two years that constitute, "Memories", and it is these works that most completely integrate the craftsman like drawing skills which derive from an architectural education and practice, with a cultural history rich in Persian imagery in the most cohesive and understandable way. Seldom are lines more beautifully drawn, and seldom are images more richly infused with cultural history.
Donald C. Royse, PhD, AIA
Professor Emeritus of Architecture
Washington University