Milad Tower

Milad Tower is Tehran's tall thin exclamation mark: a concrete shaft rising about 435 metres in the north-west of the city, finished in 2007. Its name comes from milad, a Persian word meaning birth or birthday. The design is credited to the architect Mohammad Reza Hafezi, and the structure was built first as a working telecommunications mast, carrying broadcast and communications equipment above the haze of the capital.

The tower's most recognisable feature is its head, a many-storeyed pod clasped around the shaft high above the ground. It holds observation decks, a revolving restaurant and technical floors, and from here the city reads like a map: the grid of the north climbing towards the Alborz mountains, the older, denser south flattening into the plain.

At its foot sits a convention centre and a broad plinth of halls and terraces, so that the tower works as a civic complex as well as a mast. For many Tehranis it is less a monument than a reference point, the thing you glance at to know which way you are facing. Lit up at night, it is one of the clearest signs that the capital's skyline belongs to the twenty-first century as much as to the Pahlavi or Qajar past.