The 1979 Iranian Revolution abruptly altered nearly 60 years of Pahlavi nationbuilding in ways that continue to reverberate in people's minds today. This dissertation project seeks to understand these reverberations by addressing how notions of identity and its related threads of modernity and tradition are woven into aspects of the capital city's built environment at the end of the 20th century. How does an Islamic country articulate late 20th-century modernism and simultaneously retain its traditional character? How does Iran, which summarily rejected "Westernization," integrate modernity without compromising its religious and regional individuality? This project will address these questions by investigating how public structures, such as government buildings and state-sponsored mosques, have been used to articulate identity in Tehran since 1979.