How can one preserve the characteristics of old buildings while enabling their coexistence and adaptation to contemporary life?
Emarat Jan is a renovation project of a sixty-year-old building on the outskirts of Tehran.
A) The concept of a second home as a space for experiencing one's desired lifestyle has become one of the unwritten necessities of citizens — predominantly educated middle-aged individuals.
B) Today's citizens have chosen suburban areas not only for pleasant qualities such as distance from the urban bustle and a different climate, but also for the possibility of experiencing their desired way of life. Suburban areas, given their physical characteristics and greater freedom of action, provide a suitable context for fulfilling this desire.
C) The old houses existing in these areas sometimes possess unique features and typologies, but due to the incompatibility of their obsolete traditional spatial systems with the contemporary citizen's lifestyle, we now witness the fabric of these areas being demolished at an ever-increasing pace, with new buildings of diverse forms and identities replacing them.
Our question in this project was: How can one maintain this local heritage while enabling its coexistence and adaptation to the contemporary lifestyle of the project's client?
First: To this end, in the initial phase we identified the elements that produce the characteristics of this building. It appears that the massive load-bearing brick walls, the pitched roof with corrugated metal cladding and unfinished wooden trusses are among the common elements of buildings in this fabric, and while creating a distinct character, they have also preserved the neighborhood's memories over the years.
Second: The project, while preserving these elements, carved the building from within, transforming it into a vessel with unique spatial qualities and enabling the loading of a new spatial system.
Third: In the third phase, after removing walls and partitions in relation to the program change, we replaced the former spatial organization with new volumes serving as lifestyle boxes.
This coexistence between the old traditional structure and the added structure is such that, through processing harmonious with the building's totality, it strengthens its spatial sense and creates a unified space with emphasis on the remaining elements of the building that have accumulated the greater part of its memories.