The Man & The House, Damavand

Saeed Khan is a builder of construction projects. For two years he climbed the mountain every morning and returned home at night; later he took his own house to the mountains around Tehran. He understands the course of life through mountaineering. The builder Saeed Khan and the nature-loving Saeed Khan are each, in their own right, intelligible. But the contradiction of the two in architectural design raised a new question: 'Can the space of a house between logic and imagination be a dwelling for him?'

For an answer, we turned to Bachelard. For Bachelard, the dark basement of the house is the place of imagination. He says that as we leave the ground and gain height under the attic, we ascend to awareness. The basis of the design of Saeed Khan's house is this diagram — the upper space, in response to the diversity of his life, is multiplied so that a fabric of Bachelardian attics is obtained. The vertical basement-to-attic structure rests on the difference of ground levels, and its parts have slipped one over the other.

The basement leans against the slope, and through colour, geometry and material, spaces of imagination have been created. Its openings onto the garden are where the oblique geometry meets the orthogonal compositions above — because the house, at height, finds a regular geometry.

The upper and the lower halves of the house are detached from each other, yet they share veins of each other and mix together. The two contradictory spaces — both in the mind of the man and in the body of the building — find clefts through which they seep into each other, and their cohabitation becomes possible.