About Nader Ardalan

Having spent many years in America, there was a deep-rooted need to know his origins. “Little did I know that this quest for origins would lead me ‘deeper’ than I had ever expected,” Nader observes. In 1964, he accepted the position of “Architect of the Fields” from the National Iranian Oil Company and moved from San Francisco to Masjid-i-Sulaiman, in Southwest Iran. At first, the shock of the drastic change from America to Iran was immense, but soon the splendor of Persian art and architecture captured his imagination. There, in the shadow of the cyclopean stone platforms of Masjid-i-Sulaiman, Nader met the archaeologist Dr. Roman Ghirshman and helped draw some of his finds at the Parthian Bard-i-Neshandeh and the Elamite site of Choga Zambil. His first appreciation of the value that history places upon great architecture came while observing these ancient ruins being excavated with the loving touch of soft camel hair brushes and the exactitude of theodolite measurements.

After two years he moved to Tehran, where as a design partner of Abdul Aziz Farmanfarmaian, he directed the design of Iran’s first high-rise residential apartments, the Asian Games Sports Center and the Iran Center for Management Studies in association with Harvard Business School.

Soon he began teaching architectural seminars at Tehran University Faculty of Fine Arts and conducted a series of personal surveys of the architectural vocabulary and aesthetic concepts of the culture of Persia, which resulted in the 1973 co-authorships of a publication by the University of Chicago Press entitled: “The Sense of Unity” – The Sufi Tradition in Persian Architecture. It was during this time that he formed his own architectural and planning firm, The Mandala Collaborative.