Designing in Teheran | Gianluca Aresta

In the ideation of the building we analyzed the place and its position in a commercial and residential context, which is a little bit chaotic in the appearance, where the ampleness of the road prevails compared to the height and the consistence of the built. Therefore, an element which attracts the attention and also captures the imagination has been thought to reveal a mysterious world inside. The result is a romantic organism that evokes some suggestions distant in time but somehow actual and above all near to the reality in which it is inserted. A building that not only talks with the light in its seasonal variations but also with the greenery of the avenues from which it captures the leafy branches and encages them in its hanging gardens. It is a volume that fills with its presence the whole ampleness of the area but that is empty inside where the offset of the different plans is articulated in a game of empathy with the passer-by and with whom works and lives inside it. The passer-by becomes a wayfarer which finds himself in a porch where the suggestion of the warping of the pillars, departing from a point and ramifying in three tilted stems, creates the image of a forest, of an oasis, of a shelter. From the street level there is the projection towards the inside of the building; the access passages open up and the staircases climb up and gradually bring to the discovery of world above. The whole volume is contained by a façade plotted with a terracotta pipeline for the natural evaporative solar cooling which permits the reading of the volume also at a distance, a veil throughout which it is possible to see the hanging gardens and the complexity of the life that develops inside. The passage between the outside and the inside, from the summer shining light and from the cold and the snow in winter time, to the most reassuring environment of the inside with its comforting and protected climate, is gradual: not a brutal change of light but the entry becomes an important moment, slow, not because long in time, but progressive in getting used to the senses of a new place. Inside everything speaks in a familiar language, because the materials surrounding us are usual: the terracotta, of which are made the pipelines, that interweave and form a thick texture on which, as on an archeological find, grow small plants similar to musk; the gardens, thought for the those who look at them during the work breaks, are not excessively height and everything is easy to comprehend. The construction is built around a series of pillars that like trees have at the ground floor their trunk which becomes then larger and articulated in all the floors generating some projections which change like a rotating kaleidoscope. The organism has been conceived with environmental sustainability criteria, keeping the man and the context in which he lives and operates, in great consideration. For its realization have been hypothesized materials and technologies in order to optimize the use of renewable energies such as solar. Moreover, the collection of rain water in underground cisterns, allows the reuse of it for inside usages, irrigation and summer natural refreshing.

The underground part of building is built using reinforced concrete beams, columns and bulkhead for supporting the earth thrust. At the moment the foundation is imagined as bedplate. Depending on the geotechnical properties of the ground, pile foundations could be provided for transferring the building actions to the ground. The elevation part of the building consists in a steel spatial structure which is isolated at the base. The spatiality is due to the fact that three sloped columns start from centroid of each column at foundation. The columns have been though with constant tube cross section, with diameter of about 35cm and thickness that is variable 2 to 3cm; the beam has H cross section with depth equal to about 53cm; the floors, which are composite slabs with profiled steel sheeting, form triangular and trapezoidal fields. The structure has been analysed both under vertical loads, due to dead and live actions, and horizontal forces, due to both wind and seismic actions. Since the building is located in high seismic zone, a cut between the underground and the elevation parts of the structure has been made for positioning seismic isolators. In such way, the underground part of the building transfers the horizontal seismic actions to the lateral walls, which are stiffer and resistant in their vertical plane, while the elevation part, which is not connectedµ to the underground part through the seismic devices, are mainly loaded by the wind and gravity actions.