Art & Music Research Faculty

Art and Music Research Institute in Qazvin, designed by Pedram Pakzad and Farhad Khadempour of Part Shahr Engineers, won Second Place in the Renovation category at the 14th Memar Award (2014). The project is located within the historic Saad al-Saltaneh complex, a Qajar-era brick ensemble in Qazvin, occupying a caravanserai called Negar al-Saltaneh that had previously been restored for public exhibitions.

With the change of function, the designers chose to intervene minimally in the traditional building, instead adding postmodern appendages to define the spatial character. Binary oppositions — traditional/postmodern, order/disorder, new/old, rough/polished — shaped the project concept. The supplementary elements took their form from the lines of the traditional structure's walls, then were cut, folded, and bent into the desired forms, rendered in white to create a calm environment for music research.

Inside the classroom space, an oven restored during the building's conservation was covered with glass and combined with horizontal louvers and lighting to create a tableau on the floor. Since this oven had been used for pottery firing, its floor was covered with broken pottery shards to preserve a memory of the distant past. The lighting design draws from musical lines and notes, with cables representing staff lines and each light fixture representing a musical note — in the assembly hall, lights are positioned according to Beethoven's Symphony No. 5. The built area is 270 square meters.