The institute was planned by Mirza Reza Mohandes and built by the architect Mohammad-Taqi Khan Memar-Bashi under the supervision of the Qajar prince Bahram Mirza. The campus included an assembly hall, a theater, a library, a cafeteria, and a publishing house. European instructors were recruited to staff departments that had no precedent in Iran. Dr. Jakob Eduard Polak taught medicine and pharmacy. Austrian and Italian officers taught artillery, mineralogy, and infantry tactics. Jules Richard taught French. Alfred Jean Baptiste Lemaire taught music. The faculty was a deliberate import: sixteen European professors alongside twenty-six Iranian ones by 1889.

Dar al-Fonun's graduates populated Iran's government for generations. Mirza Hossein Khan Moshir od-Dowleh Sepahsalar served as prime minister from 1871 to 1873. Mohammad-Hassan Khan Etemad os-Saltaneh became a leading politician and historian. Military graduates rose to command armies and navies. Admiral Gholam-Ali Bayandor, an alumnus, would die defending Iran during the 1941 Anglo-Soviet invasion. By 1889, the school was training 287 students. By 1891, it had graduated 1,100. These numbers seem modest, but in a country that had no comparable institution, each graduate represented a node in a network of modernization.

In 1930, Mirza Yahya Khan Qaragozlu, the minister of education, ordered the original building destroyed. A new structure rose in its place, designed according to Russian engineering principles. The demolition erased Amir Kabir's physical creation, but the institution's legacy had already propagated beyond any single building. The Faculty of Medicine, established as part of Dar al-Fonun in 1851, evolved into the School of Medicine in 1919 and was eventually absorbed into the University of Tehran. Other departments followed the same trajectory: birth within Dar al-Fonun, growth into independence, and absorption into the modern university system.

Amir Kabir's story haunts the institution he created. He was a reformer in a court suspicious of reform, a man who built modern infrastructure while surrounded by rivals plotting his removal. His execution, carried out in a bathhouse in Kashan, came just months after Dar al-Fonun admitted its first students. The grand vizier never saw his school graduate a single class. Yet the school's influence proved impossible to reverse. Iran's first feature film was directed by Ovanes Ohanian, an Armenian-Iranian filmmaker who built his career in Tehran during the era Dar al-Fonun's graduates were reshaping the country. The first generation of Iranian diplomats, physicians, and generals trained within its walls. Amir Kabir built something stronger than himself.