HOSEYN AMANAT WAS THE WUNDERKIND of modern Iranian architecture. He was just out of college, still living in his childhood bedroom in his parents’ home, when he won the most prestigious architectural competition of his generation. His design, completed within the two-month deadline and finished at the end of forty-eight hours of almost incessant work, was chosen for a building that was initially intended to celebrate twenty-five hundred years of monarchy. But the structure, called Shahyad—yad is Persian for memory—not only became the icon of Tehran and Iran but was inexorably transformed into the most recognizable symbol and metaphor of the shah’s era and his vision for Iran. Amanat was twenty-two years old when he won the design competition. As an iconic structure, Shahyad became the subject of some satire and considerable criticism. Inflated stories about its allegedly exorbitant cost and about massive financial malfeasance among those involved in its construction made it one of the favorite subjects of the opposition’s campaign of whispers and gossip. In fact, according to Hoseyn Amanat, the entire structure cost nearly 8 million tooman (a little more than $1 million). The sum seems particularly paltry when we remember that a few years later, when the shah went on what the CIA called his “lending binge,” Iran gave away almost 1.3 billion dollars. But even those who did not subscribe to sundry financial allegations used Shahyad to poke fun at the shah’s regime. In Ebrahim Golestan’s subversive Mysteries of the Ghost Valley, the nouveau riche “man” builds a phallic monument to his own grandeur, and the structure mischievously but unmistakably conjures the image of Shahyad. In fact so enduring has the iconic influence of Shahyad been that even after the revolution, when the building—like every other site bearing a name from the ancien régime—was renamed Azadi, or Freedom, it continued to be identified with the shah and his days. As nostalgia for the past has increased in recent years, a touch of romance and a hint of reification have come to surround Shahyad. Not a week passes that Amanat does not receive some note about his role in the building. Sometimes it is a technical inquiry, other times it is professional praise, often from students of art and architecture. But neither the shah’s desire to build the monument, nor the public’s response to it, are unusual in the larger context of Iranian history.