For information renting the Temple Chess & Poetry Garden, please contact the Des Moines Park and Recreation Office at 515-237-1386 or visit us at 3226 University Avenue in Des Moines, IA.
Siah Armajani was born in Teheran in 1939, Siah Armajani has been a resident of Minneapolis since 1960. He considers himself an artist for public spaces, one who seeks not to create towering monumental works but more those which might, while retaining an aesthetic meaning, have a social, communicative and functional significance. In Armajani's words, “…public art's basic aim is to de-mystify the concept of creativity. We are not interested in the myth which is created around artists and by artists. What is important to us is the mission and the program and the work itself.â€
Armajani's culture of origin is itself steeped in tradition, but Persia is also a country where the spoken word is regarded not only as an instrument and a means of communication, but primarily as the poetry of everyday life. This reality has clearly influenced Armajani's approach to public art, in which an awareness and acknowledgement of culture is as fundamental to the construction of his work as is their social functionality. Even in his early projects, many of which incorporated lines of European poetry, Armajani was already critically exploring the architectural images of conventional cultural expression, and the way in which the emotional responses evoked by high culture relate to the culture of practical reality.
Armajani is most well known for the Olympic Tower he designed for the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. His work has been exhibited both in one-man shows at the Max Protech Gallery, New York, and other galleries and museums across the country and around the world. His other permanent constructions include The Poetry Garden, Lannan Foundation, Los Angeles, CA, Reading Garden No.1 in Roanoke, Virginia; Reading House in Lake Placid, New York; The Louis Kahn Lecture Room at the Samuel S. Fleisher Art Memorial in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and NOAA Bridges in Seattle, Washington, the Irene Hixon Whitney Bridge in Minneapolis (1988), and the Bridge and Torch Tower for the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. He has also collaborated with the renowned architect Cesar Pelli on a number of architectural projects, the most important of which was the project for Battery Park in New York.
