Abvarzan Office Building- Blind Façade`
The Blind Façade is the name that we’ve given to our project for Abvarzan Consulting Company’s Office Building. The project, is a celebration of two contradicting aspects of Tehrani office buildings. The first aspect is the enormous amount of low quality generic five-storey infill (office) buildings of Tehran which has rendered the city ugly. These buildings are a result of maximum possible usage of space available (FAR), therefore leaving architecture with no choice but to paint and decorate a two dimensional façade with exasperating materials. The second aspect is, on the contrary, a splendid handful of modernist Tehrani office buildings built in the 1960’s and 70s with rich architectural quality and façade design that can be distinguished as Tehrani style of office buildings.
The Blind Façade is the name that we’ve given to our project for Abvarzan Consulting Company’s Office Building. The project, is a celebration of two contradicting aspects of Tehrani office buildings. The first aspect is the enormous amount of low quality generic five-storey infill (office) buildings of Tehran which has rendered the city ugly. These buildings are a result of maximum possible usage of space available (FAR), therefore leaving architecture with no choice but to paint and decorate a two dimensional façade with exasperating materials. The second aspect is, on the contrary, a splendid handful of modernist Tehrani office buildings built in the 1960’s and 70s with rich architectural quality and façade design that can be distinguished as Tehrani style of office buildings.
Our concluding design strategy to reflect on these two contradictory aspects was twofold: What if we close our eyes so that we would not see those ugly facades of our surroundings (clearing the problem as a solution), and make a tribute to the old valuable Tehrani office buildings of our recent history? The Architectural result of this scenario was a building with a double façade that could close itself entirely to the outside (also secure itself) allowing the users to “close” their eyes to the absence of beauty in the city, and in addition, the well-crafted detailing of the façade that aims to put the spatial qualities of play of light and shadow, rhythm and delicacy in scale into historical continuity with the past. The rendering of the façade also came from our resilient approach to the aspirations of the client who in a way represents the dominant taste of the society: Aluminum Composite, a generic material that is being used widely allover Tehran, was implemented in the outer skin of the Blind Façade.
The spatial diagram of the project involves our response to necessities of the site. As the building had to be situated on the northern edge of the plot and pedestrian/parking entrance/access had to be taken from the southern side, this means that between the building and the street there is the open space of the courtyard that can serve as a potential interval to make the building more visible and readable from the street. This goal could be achieved by defining a porous wall that includes the parking and pedestrian access to the building. To make the space more open and coherent, a sandblast semi-transparent glass façade in the ground floor and the first floor has provided maximum continuity and depth of view and flow of space from the street to the northern edge of the building.
