Tehran's art scene runs on Friday openings, not opening hours. Three days here move from Amanat's marble tower and the Iranshahr gallery row to Roudaki Hall's orchestra pit and the miniature cabinets of Behzad and Reza Abbasi.
Hossein Amanat was 24 when he won the 1966 competition; his tower splices a Sassanid broken arch with Islamic muqarnas across 8,000 cut blocks of Isfahan marble. A lift climbs to the observation deck, and the basement museum sits below the plaza.
A 1940s officers' club in Honarmandan Park turned into the city's art clubhouse: four galleries rotating roughly every two weeks, a cinematheque, a theatre hall and a garden café where curators and students argue over saffron ice cream.
Assar has shown Iranian painting from a Barforushan Alley townhouse since 1999. Within a ten-minute walk sit Etemad, Mohsen's outpost and O Gallery, all on the same rotation cycle, so one afternoon covers four independent programmes.
Leila Araghian won the commission at 26. Her three-level steel truss curves over Modarres Expressway to join Taleghani and Abo-Atash parks, widening into benches and terraces so the crossing becomes the destination rather than the shortcut.
Named for the Safavid master painter and arranged to be read downward: pre-Islamic bronzes and Achaemenid gold on the top floor, Islamic metalwork and ceramics below, then a dim floor of Safavid and Qajar miniatures, lacquer and calligraphy.
Trading since 1927 on Jomhouri Avenue, Naderi was the canteen of Sadegh Hedayat and the Rab'e literary circle. The tiled courtyard, waistcoated waiters of forty years' service and unchanged menu — Russian salad, cream puffs, café glacé — are the reason to sit.
Ali Sardar Afkhami's 1972 cylinder at Valiasr Crossroads, ringed by tiled columns and sunk into its own plaza, holds five halls and remains the centre of Iranian stagecraft. Rehearsing actors and ticket queues occupy the surrounding steps all afternoon.
Opened in 1967 and modelled on the Vienna Staatsoper down to the horseshoe balconies, Vahdat houses the Tehran Symphony Orchestra and the national opera company, plus classical Persian ensembles of tar, kamancheh, santur and ney.
Eighteen palaces scattered across 110 hectares of plane trees in Shemiran. The Behzad Museum of miniatures, the Mother's Palace and the Fine Arts Museum repay attention far more than the marble bulk everyone photographs first.
A steep, compact bazaar of herb sacks, torshi barrels and dried Omani limes wrapping the turquoise dome of Imamzadeh Saleh. The shrine courtyard is the neighbourhood's living room, busiest on Thursday evenings before the weekend.
The last Shah's actual house, left as it stood in 1979: a modernist pavilion with a retracting roof, the Qajar wood-inlay Ahmad Shahi Pavilion, and the Jahan Nama gallery where a Picasso hangs a few metres from Luristan bronzes.
Sixty-five thousand square metres built into Abbas Abad hill and widely billed as the largest bookstore on earth: Persian and foreign-language floors, a science hall, an art cinema and a rooftop garden Tehrani families use as a park.