The housing market in Iran and in particular in Tehran has been the subject to many the fluctuations in land value thought to be in the region of 81% and rental values of close to 245% in the past few years, this has meant that the housing market has remained buoyant despite all the recent economical difficulties.
When approached with this project one of the fundamental question asked was how one would begin to create housing for the 21st century without loosing touch with Iran’s rich architectural heritage.
Our approach attempts to use whats best of traditional Iranian architecture in terms of performance and connect this with modern design sensibilities and methods available to us.
The starting point for this proposal as with many of our schemes was the simplest form possible, in this case a linear bar situated on the northern boundary of the site. From this starting point we were able to add parameters which would augment the formal gesture on site. The proposal in its current iteration begins to create communal amenity as well as public amenity spaces which are almost forgotten within new residential developments. the current approach in Tehran seems to be that of maximizing the building foot print on site, something which we enthusiastically argued against.

In this particular case we were able to explain to the client through a series of models and diagrams the benefits associated to the inclusion of open public and share space.
The proposal creates open public space to the Northern boundary while maintaining streetscape and urban views, the residential blocks which cantilever above the retail podium are derived from splitting the initial liner block into 2 and rotating these out to create to separate blocks.
This operation allowed us to explore and optimize the orientation of each building to meet privacy and performative needs, a further level of control was added through the variation of the depth of glazing elements. Through analytical tools we were able to highlight the issues surrounding orientation and solar gains, a simple variation on opening depths allowed us to control and mitigate the issue with solar gains, On the southern facade which is exposed to harsh sunlight openings are placed deeper within the floor plate and as this needs decreases to the north so does this depth depth allowing us to maximize sunlight where possible.

The projects attempts to connect a history of performance in in Iran with modern strategies of design and in doing so create higher design standards within a housing market which at the moment does not consider design and architecture valuable in any shape or form.
We look forward to developing this project further in 2014.