I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited. _ Jorge Luis Borges
I was born in Tehran, Iran, in 1974, when the 7th Asian Games were held in Tehran. At four, when the revolution was taking place, I got addicted to LEGO, which I have not quit yet. The eight years of elementary and secondary school were my Dark Ages, overcast by the shadow of the Iran-Iraq war! During high school I apprenticed as a draughtsman. Then, it was part of the high school curriculum, which mandated attending a workplace one day a week to learn a job, skill, or craft. At about the same time, in the summer of 1988, while traveling the central Persian Plateau (Dasht-e Kavir) and visiting some remote cities and villages such as Abyaneh, Neyasar, Ardestan, and Nain, I was taken away by the magic of art and architecture; since then I am a restless soul. With these convictions, I entered the School of Architecture at the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Tehran.
In late November 1998, I was in a rush at the airport to leave on a business trip. Having a personal email address has just started to become a trend, and I needed one for my meeting in Syria. I still remember that you could check your email only at Internet cafes because having access to the Internet was difficult in Iran.
I had just a couple of minutes left to get on board, and a friend of mine was helping me get registered on Yahoo! We tried my full name in different ways like: RezaAliabadi, AliabadiReza, rezaaliabadi, raliabadi, and similar versions. We even tried it with a few symbols (-, _, /) between my first and family names, but they were all taken. That was the first time that I understood there were other people with the same name. When my friend was playing around with letters and symbols, I just wrote down my full name, kept the essentials, and got rid of all the vowels:
reza aliabadi > r_z_ _l__b_d_ > rzlbd
Under the pressure and tension of losing my flight, I had come up with a miniature version of my identity – an index of my own, which carried the essence of my ID and was unique. There might be other Reza Aliabadis but there was only one RZLBD. After about a decade, it became a pseudonym, almost my personal signature, and my sole mark.
I will never forget the day I sat behind my used-to-be desk in my used-to-be office making an exclusive list of all my used-to-be assets. I had finally decided to leave Tehran for Montreal and to do an M.Phil. degree at McGill University. The challenge was converting my whole life into two suitcases, each weighing 30 kilograms, based on the IATA regulation for overseas flights.
Though it was hard to ignore lots of beloved possessions, especially since many of them were accompanied by memories and passions, and many of them had been achieved through hard effort and struggle, it was a situation that I learned from. Surprisingly, things and priorities expose their real value in tough circumstances. One learns to do without a thing and skip unnecessary things. For almost twenty years, I have been purging my possessions constantly and trying not to add clutter to my cart. Well, as a nomad, I know nothing better than being weightless.
Before reestablishing my practice in Toronto, I had to do 5,600 hours of internship, as, in most cases, there is no reciprocity rule for licensed architects between many countries. During this rather frustrating period, I developed a habit of quitting my job once a year and pushing myself out of my comfort zone. Three major solo expeditions to the North Pole, around the world in 49 days, and the Trans-Canada across the country from the Great Lakes to the Pacific influenced my perspective toward life in general and my creative practice in particular. They have struck my imagination and given me feelings that have conditioned my view of the world.
Living in a fishing boat with two Inuit “goodfellas” and floating on the vastness of the Canadian Arctic along with breathtaking icebergs, I found that a day can be half a year long and that sense of time and directions (both cardinal and magnetic) can get lost; only because one dares to dislocate oneself enough. This distorted the basic conventions and formed a philosophical foundation in me to respect the essentials, the plain, and the most important: void – where time and space become inseparable.
Hopping all around the world while crossing out a list of my favourite to-be-visited items, from Le Corbusier open-hand-monument in Chandigarh, to the Giza in Cairo, and Michelangelo’s David in Florence, I committed myself not to stay in the same city for two consecutive nights. This widened my understanding of extreme social and cultural diversities, our “lowest common multiple” and our “greatest common factor”; it also taught me to respect, adapt, and accommodate any given circumstances.
Driving the Trans Canada Highway for five days inspired me to do a photo installation that I later called Transimage. It is a multi-layered scene resulting from the superimposition of fifty photographs taken at intervals of one hundred kilometres, exactly. The superimposed illustration had created new possibilities for new readings and interpretations. This changed my perception, and I started to appreciate the capacity of overlay, merging countless visible and invisible forces.
I am still keeping up with this old habit and escaping now and then. This is very helpful to feel liberated, to have a dialogue with myself, to be away from the inertia of daily life, to reflect on my creative practice, to step back and make sure what I am doing and why I am doing it, and to begin again every time with a different dimension of awareness. This sense of beginning/becoming keeps me interested, obsessed, and passionate. It is like a love affair, and the idea is to keep falling in love with your beloved!
As far as I can remember, I always had, and still have, a desire to sort and catalogue related things based on an established system, in order to look for correlations or variations in their apparent orders. In my formative years, I lent myself to these exercises on many occasions, where I repeatedly and methodically tried to make an inventory of the same object of a study. For example, I photographed all the people who were sleeping in an airport terminal or documented all the windows in a remote small village. Gradually, this led me to not just catalogue existing things but also create such collections myself as open and closed series.
Then, in 2012, it began with a single cube. I launched what would become the first of a lifelong commitment – 100 Restless Cubes. It was not just a project, but a provocation. A question posed through repetition: What happens when you revisit the same idea a hundred times? Does it deepen? Collapse? Evolve? This became the seed of a greater journey: the 100 Series.
Since then, it has become a quiet obsession – one hundred projects of one hundred parts, across media and disciplines, to be completed over a lifetime. A promise to keep working, not until perfection is reached, but until the limits of a thought are known. It is a practice rooted in rules, and yet it seeks freedom through those very constraints. Paradoxically, the more boundaries I define, the more infinite the space within becomes.
There is something sacred in iteration – a kind of devotion. The 100 Series is not about answers, but about asking the same question from a hundred angles. It is not about mastery, but about attention. Not about signature, but about structure. Like a monk with a mantra, I return to the same forms, the same typologies, the same constraints – not to repeat, but to reveal.
I have often felt that design, like life, is not about the arrival point, but the variations along the path. The 100 Series is that path made visible – a taxonomy of possibility, a typology of faith. It is a way to catalogue not just ideas, but convictions. A way to measure time not in hours or years, but in hundreds. It is a body of work that resists finality. Even in its completeness, it will remain open-ended; because each part contains a universe, and each universe is still only a fragment.
100 Series is my ritual. My way of returning. My way of remaining. My way of making sense.
Fifty. It wasn’t just a number, but a moment. A line drawn in the sand – neither too far behind to forget nor too far ahead to imagine. It was as if I could step out from beneath the weight of my own past and take a breath without wondering where the next one would come from.
On the eve of my fiftieth year, I chose to do the most liberating thing I had ever done: I closed my architecture practice. To surrender my license, to return the stamp, to dismantle the office I had so carefully built – these were not mere formalities. They were rituals of release. It wasn’t about giving up a profession, but about unbecoming something I no longer recognized. The practice had become a cage. The only way to be free was to open the door and walk away.
Self-expression requires no validation. It simply is. What does it mean to be an anarchist, an Anarchitect? To no longer be confined to the rigid definitions of space and form? To design without permission. To create without rules. To practice without practice. It was terrifying. It was exhilarating. And, at last, it was mine. The stamp I once pressed on blueprints had no place anymore. The ink had dried, and now, a new canvas awaited.
I sold the office – with all its walls, its desks, its plans, and its paperwork. Each object, each drawer, held memories of a past self, a version of me that no longer existed. Yet even as I let go of the tangible, the essence of it all remained – embedded in the way I now saw the world: as a constellation of forms and voids, a perpetual dance of creation, destruction, and rebirth. I returned to what I had always loved: creation. Not as profession, but as vocation, a soul’s expression. A language beyond translation. Without the demands of a practice or the expectations of a profession, I could devote myself to the exploration of my inner landscape. I became a true nomad of thought, wandering through the labyrinth of my own mind. There were no longer rules to follow, except my own, only the essence of self-expression.
What I missed was creating for the sake of creating – being unapologetically me, free from any labels, constraints, or definitions. I had always been a restless soul, but now I was free to wander, not just across cities or continents, but through the infinite terrains of imagination.
It is a strange thing, surrendering. But in surrender, I found space – space to simply be. The art I now pursue is not about building walls, but about dissolving them. It seeks the delicate balance between form and void, between what is seen and what is between, between the self and the world that surrounds it.
And so, I walk forward – not as an architect (though I build), not as a designer (though I shape), not as a photographer (though I capture), not as an artist (though I mark), and not as an author (though I write), but perhaps as a marginal man with no vowels – freed from time, title, and expectation. I am still the same, yet different. And that difference is the greatest creation I have yet to make.
_RZLBD
Toronto, Canada