It is with great sadness that the AA has learned of the death of AA alumnus, architect and scholar Kaveh Mehrabani. Diploma 7 and Projective Cities tutor Hamed Khosravi has provided the following tribute to Kaveh:
‘In 1984, the editor of the newly launched AA student publication Across Architecture asked several staff and students at the school: “What is the main issue of architecture today?”. Kaveh Mehrabani, an AA alumnus and instructor, responded: “to rid architecture of its vandal image and restore its social responsibility and cultural status.” While this response might not read as unusual within architecture today, it seemed at the time to offer a faint glimmer of hope.
Mehrabani spent his entire academic and professional career as an architect and scholar working to ‘restore’ this social agency. He was born in Iran and studied first at Westminster and then at the AA, spending his fourth and fifth years in Diploma 1 – run at that time by Dalibor Vesely, Mohsen Mostafavi and Peter Carl. Mehrabani graduated in 1980, and after a few years of teaching at Oxford Brookes and the AA, he returned to Tehran in early 1990s where he lived until his passing on 11 February 2023.
Mehrabani dedicated his life to recording, archiving and reflecting on the modernist architecture of Iran and its inherent sociopolitical agenda. Instead of working solely as an architect and designer, he instead chose to serve society by educating young and enthusiastic students. Mehrabani remained hopeful about the transformative power of space and design until the end of his life; one can effect change even through the architecture of a cemetery, as his final project ‘Necropolis’ beautifully proved.’