Designing in Teheran | Benetton Project A

To plan in Teheran means facing reality in a place rich with its own identity. Proceeding with the analysis of Iranian society, one realizes how often form separates from content and being separates from seeming. The Bazaar may represent the clearest of these places. In a city where structures have maintained their traditional character, the bazaars are always open towards contemporary multiculturalism. The tradition, therefore the seeming, often hides the real life that necessarily becomes being.
The impossibility in Teheran to create public meeting spaces like town squares seems to come from the same word, city. In Farsi, this is shah-re, which comes from shah, “king.” Perhaps it is for this reason that agora, a place where citizens can meet up, does not exist.
For us, planning for Benetton in Teheran means having the possibility to consider the current absences as generators for possible new existences.
The architectural project comes from an absence: the town square. It aims to build the new structure through the turning of three volumes on the geometrical, distributive and conceptual center of gravity of the project. The Benetton building becomes a structure that abandons the nomadic character of a commercial component and becomes the center of urban movements. It is a space that absorbs the sounds, atmospheres and goods of the city through “channels” of passages that lead to the internal town square. It re-proposes them as filtered and re-adapted through video, photos, films in loops like new advertisement, through large screens positioned on the facades and internally in the semi-public spaces of the galleries and the hall. The flexibility of commercial spaces, the presence of a tea garden and a bookshop represent the Benetton philosophy, that is, a continuous interaction between the brand and the indigenous.
The volumetry of this new city architecture tapers off towards the top through a reduction of surface and turning of the volumes above. It is made up of colored cement walls, large glass windows that line the outside and prefabricated perforated panels. The division of the building into three large volumes and their rotation allows for the creation of five large terraces as panoramic viewing points.


Team leader: Lapo Ruffi
Team project: Lapo Ruffi, Antonio Monaci