The University of Utah is teaming with renowned designer Mehrdad Yazdani to imagine a new home for the Spencer Fox Eccles School of Medicine. The result will change the way we see health care throughout Utah and beyond.

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 allday 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 US. 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 Cannon Design in Los Angeles.