A Model for the Future

As long as Mehrdad Yazdani can remember, he’s had a sketchbook.

Even as a child growing up in Iran, he would carry it around and draw the things he loved. In elementary school, it was soccer: sketches of his favorite teams, drawings of a goalie blocking a shot. Later he moved on to his favorite cartoon characters. But by high school his tastes had become more sophisticated as he favored impressionist painters over cartoons and learned to mix oil paints to copy artists like Cézanne and Van Gogh. It was in high school that he made a big decision: he would become an artist.

When Yazdani’s sister applied to architecture school at the University of Tehran she began to study for the entry exam. Little brother Mehrdad tagged along and took some painting classes, and soon he saw a new avenue for his love of art: the creation of physical spaces. “Just seeing and hearing what they were talking about, and what architects do, and seeing pictures of well-known architectural buildings and monuments across the world,” Yazdani says, “I realized that architecture could be something that allows me to merge my passion and interest in the creative process with the ability to impact people’s lives on a broader scale: the places they live, the places they work, the places they worship.”

Yazdani took his shot at the architecture program his sister was preparing for—taking the all-day exam that would test him in literature, English, math, drawing, and architectural history. He was in—and in with accolades: 3,000 students took the exam that year; the school chose 80, and Yazdani was number four. He entered the program in 1978, but his time at the University of Tehran was limited. One year later, the Iranian Revolution began, and Yazdani began to think that schooling in the country would change—or at least be put on hold for a time, so he looked to the States to continue his education. He earned a spot at the University of Texas-Austin—the No. 10 architectural program in the U.S. From there, he went on to earn another degree at Harvard’s School of Design and eventually created Yazdani Studio for design and architecture, a partnership with CannonDesign in Los Angeles.

Even at 63 years old, Yazdani still carries a sketchbook. It sits on his dining room table, where he draws every morning over breakfast. Sometimes it’s to work out a sticky problem with one of his projects. Sometimes it’s drawing a beautiful piece of architecture that he comes across in his travels. Today those sketchbooks—approximately one for every year of his life—serve as diaries of his travels, his work and the beauty of the art to which he’s dedicated his career.

“I realized that architecture could be something that allows me to merge my passion and interest in the creative process with the ability to impact people’s lives on a broader scale: the places they live, the places they work, the places they worship.”

Having worked on projects like the Resnick Sustainability Resource Center at Caltech, the Philadelphia Neurologic Institute, UC San Diego Health’s Jacobs Medical Center, and the Lassonde Entrepreneur Institute at Utah’s David Eccles School of Business, Yazdani has earned the right and the accolades to be picky about his projects. When he received the call from the University of Utah School of Medicine, his studio had just completed another medical school for Kaiser Permanente in Pasadena, so the timing and the med school mindset helped him make the decision to board a plane for Utah to meet with stakeholders and begin to design what would become the Spencer Fox Eccles School of Medicine.

Public projects are where Yazdani and his studio dedicate most of their time. In fact, the studio was built around these public and institutional projects with an interest, as Yazdani puts it, to impact as many lives as possible in the creative process, “whether we’re designing a hospital for health care, a research facility for the scientist, or an educational institution that trains the minds of the future thinkers.”

With any project of this size, Yazdani and his team need to bring the creative process to a number of perspectives and then work to get everyone on the same page. “Stakeholders all have the right intention for the project,” Yazdani says, “but the lens by which they look at the project may be different. One may look at it from the fact that it bears the family name. Another would look at it and think ‘I need to educate a bunch of students here.’ Students might think, ‘Can I learn here? Can I interact, socialize?’

In a project’s early stages Yazdani builds consensus, brings stakeholders together through interactive workshops, and builds a strong vision for the project that carries it from idea to design to execution to operation. “On the scale of projects that we work on, sometimes it takes anywhere from three to 10 years from the time we start the initial conceptualization of the project, until the time the ribbon is cut, and the building is in operation,” Yazdani says. “So people come and go—administrators, stakeholders, deans. We designed a hospital for use in San Diego. We had three CEOs through the life of the project.” Because of the length of his projects and the stakeholders involved over time, Yazdani calls himself the “Keeper of the Vision”—Mehrdad Yazdani being the only surefire constant in a Mehrdad Yazdani building.

“The Eccles family immediately recognized that this school would be a pillar not just for the campus, but for the entire state. They challenged us to defy traditional approaches—to design something that would stand the test of time.”

—Mehrdad Yazdani

Yazdani met with leaders across campus including faculty, researchers, students, and patients. The George S. and Dolores Doré Eccles and Nora Eccles Treadwell Foundations were instrumental in pushing Yazdani to think boldly. “The Eccles family immediately recognized that this school would be a pillar not just for the campus, but for the entire state,” Yazdani says. “They challenged us to defy traditional approaches—to design something that would stand the test of time.”

At the U, the vision for the new medical school was all about connections. “The opportunity was to connect the main campus with the health sciences campus,” Yazdani says. Every one of the building’s four entry points connects to a promenade that moves throughout the building, including to the two-story foyer, which Yazdani calls the “public heart of the building,” and the grand forum steps that serve as a gathering space.

“The biggest challenge was how do we use this complex site that is on a cascading sloping hill, sandwiched between existing buildings?” Yazdani says. “In the process we needed to create a building that reflects the aspirations of the school, the stature of the Eccles family, and a wonderful, open, inviting space for the students to learn, socialize, and interact with each other.”

“In the process we needed to create a building that reflects the aspirations of the school, the stature of the Eccles family, and a wonderful, open, inviting space for the students to learn, socialize, and interact with each other.”

The connections that the building makes possible push way beyond the physical façade and open staircases. It will also create spaces for collaboration between faculty, students, and medical professionals across departments and disciplines in the health sciences, and the Russell M. Nelson Global Health Pavilion—with $14 million in funding provided by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—will connect the building to the wider world, enabling faculty and students to expand their innovative efforts to provide health care to more people in need, both within and beyond the boundaries of the U.S. Adaptive classrooms will allow the medical school to evolve with current medical knowledge, and new anatomy and simulation labs will allow students to learn in “real-world” situations.

“This building is being designed to advance innovation in medical education,” says Sara M. Lamb, MD, vice dean of medical education at the University of Utah. “It will enable us to continue to be a ‘proving ground’ in educating top-flight medical students who will carry medical sciences and patient care forward. The solutions created at this school and the generosity that made it possible will not only be transformational in improving health outcomes, but also extend lives and improve the quality of life for countless individuals and families.”

Yazdani ’s work is ever- evolving. He continues to paint and draw outside of his work. In fact, some of his paintings are in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and he is often praised for innovative building designs. But his work is changing more now than ever, as COVID-19 has forced the question: What’s the future of the workplace? “Now that we’re bringing the work to our homes, how does that impact the home?” Yazdani asks. “Now that we’re in a hybrid condition, what does that do to the workplace? What does that do to our downtowns? As architects, when we get a call from a client, we can’t just look at what we did 10 years ago, five years ago, or even three years ago.”

There is no doubt Yazdani and his team will work it out, likely influencing the way businesses and public spaces change over time. “We’re working and living in rapidly changing conditions,” he says. Historically, architecture is built on precedents. “You do a hospital. You learn from it. The next one is slightly better than the last one.” But in this new world, precedents won’t do. Innovation is at the core of Yazdani’s art form. “We’ve adopted a process called prototyping, which allows us to prototype future conditions, and we let that inform the program and the building design that we’re doing for the clients.” So not only does he need to create buildings for today, he also needs to predict trends of the future so those same buildings can adapt to change.

In many ways, Yazdani’s work is about connection too, creating buildings that can impact entire state health care systems and bridge the present and the future—in an art form that will never lie dormant.