Persepolis at fifty: the turquoise spectacle the empire could not outlive.

I spent the last week of the celebrations sleeping in a borrowed Peugeot on the Shiraz road, listening to a borrowed transistor radio describe a country I did not quite live in. The tents were Jansen of Paris; the columns were not. From two kilometres out, in the dust, you could already read the colour: a saturated firouzeh against the limestone, broken only by the gold of a flagpole or the navy of a uniform — Helvetica on the press kits, nasta'liq on the official menus, both perfectly set.

The Persepolis programme was, before it was anything else, a graphic-design commission. The booklets that arrived at the Embassy in October — bound in turquoise linen, debossed with a fluted column — were the work of a small studio on Khiyaban-e Naderi, with Helvetica Neue from Stempel and Marcellus titling pulled from a Letraset catalogue flown in via Beirut. I have one beside me as I write. The grid is Swiss; the rosette in the corner is Achaemenid; the captions, in two scripts, never argue with each other.

A modernism that arrived already nostalgic

What the booklets do not say, and what the tents could not, is that the imperial brief was paradoxical from the first meeting. The court wanted a design language that was unmistakably contemporary — Tehran, 1971, not Isfahan, 1671 — and at the same time unmistakably descended from Cyrus. The studio's solution, in retrospect, was to keep the geometry of the column capitals and let everything else become Helvetica. The winged bull was reduced to a single line. The lotus became a dot.