Siah Armajani, Sculptor of Communal Spaces, Dies at 81

Siah Armajani, an Iranian-born American artist whose architecturally scaled, politically inflected public sculptures have been internationally influential even as he kept a low profile in the art world, died on Aug. 27 at his home in Minneapolis, a city where he had lived and worked for 60 years. He was 81.

“I am interested in the nobility of usefulness,” Mr. Armajani was quoted as saying in a 1990 profile in The New Yorker. “My intention is to build open, available, useful, common, public gathering places. Gathering places that are neighborly.”