IMAN ANSARI

My TEDx talk, "The Architecture of Interaction," is featured on the @ted website. Thank you @tedxohiostateu for the opportunity. Talk link in bio.

Iman Ansari @imansari is an architect and historian whose work examines how modern institutions and infrastructures produce regimes of knowledge, power, and subjectivity. He is founding principal of AN.ONYMOUS @an.onymous_______ and assistant professor of Architecture at the Knowlton School, the Ohio State University. Iman Ansari’s SIM City was commissioned and published by e-flux Architecture as part of its Positions initiative prior to the US-Israeli war against Iran. While critical of the Islamic Republic and its surveillance infrastructure, it is in no way intended as an endorsement of the current military aggression against Iran. Read it at the link in bio. Images: [1] Protestors in the streets of Tehran during January 2026. From the public Telegram channel Mamlekate. Photo: Mamlekate (Telegram) / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0. [2] The author’s Iranian SIM card, obtained in the summer of 2025. Personal data redacted. [3] X-ray of a ten-year-old girl admitted to a hospital in Shiraz on January 8, 2026, showing metal pellets lodged in her face following the Islamic Republic’s crackdown on nationwide protests. Source: Dr. Kayvan Mirhadi (@DrKayvanMirhadi ), posted on X.

In July 1879, during the construction of the Johns Hopkins Hospital, bricklayer foreman John K. Bruff fell thirty feet from a ladder, fracturing his leg. His injury entered the record not through medicine, but through construction—logged in the same diary that tracked labor, materials, and weather. “In the Field of Measure,” published in MIT’s Thresholds 54 (@mit_thresholds ), follows this moment as a point of transformation, when practices of construction and care became entangled, and where architecture, medicine, and data systems converged into a shared epistemic framework. Link in bio.

Honored to receive the Charles E. MacQuigg Award for Outstanding Teaching from the College of Engineering at The Ohio State University, nominated and selected by students: “For blending humor, rigor and innovation, elevating the architecture curriculum while centering student voices, offering meaningful insight into the future of the field, and providing support beyond the classroom.” The citation says “humor”… I’ll take it. Grateful for my students, always.

My father passed away yesterday after three and a half years battling brain cancer. He was a scholar who wrote several books on international relations and spent his career building bridges between individuals and institutions across borders. But more than anything he was a poet. He loved Persian poetry, would recite Hafez, Saadi, and Ferdowsi, and wrote his own poems for occasions that moved him. He loved Iran—not just for what it was or had been, but for what it could be. He believed in service rather than slogans, and devoted his life to the quiet, patient work of bringing Iranians closer to the world, and the world closer to Iran. In one of his letters to me, years ago, he wrote: ‎“میهن عزیزمان ایران را همیشه دوست داشته باش و بدان که آینده این کشور متعلق به امثال شماست، و مردم محروم ایران حقی گردن همه ما دارند که باید روزی جبران کرد.” When diagnosed, he was writing his memoir. Cancer took his ability to read and write first—the very things that defined him. He wished to spend his remaining time with his children and grandchildren. My last visit to him was cut short last summer by the twelve-day war. When he was admitted to the ICU two months ago, I began packing to go see him. Then again the war began, flights stopped, and I never finished packing. Yesterday, with only his heart and hearing still functioning—amid not just travel but phone and internet blockage—I began recording a voice message for him. Mid-recording, my phone rang with news of his passing. He died in a hospital bed in Tehran, under the sound of explosions. A memoir started but left unwritten, a visit cut short by the war, a suitcase opened yet never packed, a voice message recorded but never heard, and the simple fact that I’m here and he’s there. Each one a failure of a different system. Each one complete in its refusal to resolve. He used to say: make sure not to leave anything behind but memories.

Thomas Jefferson envisioned the Capitol as a “model of antiquity” and the President’s House as a “modern mansion.” James Hoban’s 1792 design delivered a restrained Georgian residence, scaled deliberately as a house rather than a palace. When Theodore Roosevelt commissioned McKim, Mead & White in 1902, the architects aimed “to modernize” the original scheme—“to provide all those conveniences which now are lacking” and “to secure comfort, safety, and necessary sanitary conditions.” Electricity replaced gas-powered lighting; steel reinforced timber; an elevator supplemented stairs; heating, plumbing, telecommunications, and fire-safety systems were installed. For Charles McKim, trained at the École des Beaux-Arts, classicism was not a nostalgic revival but the contemporary language, capable of absorbing these new technologies while maintaining formal coherence. Montgomery Schuyler’s 1903 RECORD review recognized this achievement: “What the original architect might be supposed to have done, if he had had modern means to work with.” More on the White House “Modernization” in my recent essay in Architectural Record @archrecordmag . Link in bio.

Work in progress 🚧 @an.onymous_______

Iman Ansari has published “The Phantom of Modernization” in Architectural Record. The article discusses the White House ballroom project and its use of classical gestures as exemplary of broader semiotic breakdown. --- In All That Is Solid Melts into Air, Marshall Berman defined modernity as perpetual transformation—living in what he called “the maelstrom of modern life,” where constant creative destruction promises rupture and becoming. The ballroom represents the opposite: stasis disguised as novelty. The project proceeds through substitution rather than transformation: it invokes history without historical understanding, deploys technology as compliance rather than innovation, stages ceremony as performance rather than civic ritual. Neither antimodern nor postmodern, the project embodies an a-modern condition in which historical consciousness has dissolved entirely. Evacuated of temporal depth, material integrity, and social purpose, architecture is condemned to the present tense—both semantically and ontologically. Modernity has become what it once promised to overcome: eternal return disguised as transformation. Read more at the link in our bio --- @imansari @knowltonarchitecture @archrecordmag

If Roosevelt’s Beaux-Arts intervention and Trump’s ‘big, beautiful ballroom’ — both neoclassical and over a century apart — can claim the title of ‘modernization,’ what does the term really mean? The Phantom of Modernization — in @archrecordmag , March 2026. Link in bio.

Assistant Professor of Architecture Iman Ansari has published “SIM City” in e-flux. The article addresses the use of SIM cards in Iran to police citizens and curb dissent. --- Every political order has its artifact, the object through which a human body becomes a legible subject. In the ancient city, it was the wall: to be inside was to be a citizen; to be outside was to be a stranger. In the modern state, it is the document: the birth certificate, the identity card, the passport, which inscribes the individual into the bureaucratic apparatus. In Iran today, it is neither. This past summer, when I returned to the country after years of living abroad and attempted to open a bank account, I was told I would first need a national identity card. When I went to obtain one, I learned that the prerequisite was a registered SIM card. Foreign SIM cards are blocked; without an Iranian one, a phone is inert, and its carrier functionally invisible. Without a SIM, I could not receive an ID; without the ID, I could not open a bank account. The wall, the document, the chip: each marks a shift not only in the technology of identification, but also in the relationship between the individual and the political order that claims authority over her. To become a citizen in Iran is to first become legible to a surveillance infrastructure. The threshold of civic existence is no longer architectural or even bureaucratic. It is electromagnetic. Read more at the link in our bio --- @knowltonarchitecture @imansari @e_flux

Flutes.

NSD 2.0 coming soon! @an.onymous_______ @northstardermatology