AB VARZAN OFFICE BUILDING

2nd Place, Public Buildings — 14th Memar Award

TEHRAN, PEYKAN, AND OTHERS

Peykan production began in 1967, more or less concurrent with the formation of the main administrative/commercial fabric of Tehran, in the area of what was then the city center. Both Peykan and Tehran were in their prime years. Their aesthetics were not unrelated. Both heralded a new era. Both were formally distinguished. Their fates, however, each went its own way to a kind of Turkestan. One did not change for 40 years until the Minister of Industry proudly called it an archived vehicle; the other shed its entire skin and adopted its patterns of physical change from irrelevant places, and despite the occasional tolerable building, became ugly. But from those glorious years of Tehran, some relics remain. Still, if we wander comfortably and leisurely through the streets of the city center, thanks to the obsessiveness and precision of the architects of that era, we find mostly interesting office buildings.

The genealogy of this project is a form of respect for Tehran — for what it had in its years of prime and prosperity. From the facade transparency at pedestrian level and the rhythm and nature of railings and guards and the main facade divisions, to the decisive, straight, and sturdy lines of the facade. The client needed a unique identity, and our proposal was an efficient and logical relationship with Tehran, the project's context. Dear Tehran, which is good to appreciate before they sign its archival papers.

IF YOU DON'T SEE ME, I WON'T SEE MYSELF EITHER

"Ugliness grows if we close our eyes to it." Ebrahim Golestan placed this sentence at the beginning of the film "The House Is Black." It was meant to be both a manifesto and a remedy. In the present project, however, we are confronted with the undiluted, commanding presence of an entity called Tehran. Tehran, like every other pervasive and important phenomenon, has both service and betrayal. Its betrayal lies where a general insecurity has been imposed on the client and consequently on the designer. Following an extensive robbery that happened to the client's previous building, "security" had become the client's crisis issue.

They had asked us to design their building in such a way that "not a hair could pass through." They wanted all building openings in maximum-control mode. The client's demand that reached us did not stop at the level of social security. It grew and became a manifesto about psychological and visual security — where, to express Tehran's recent ugliness, before offering a solution, we needed to launch a silent march and shine a light on the problem. To commit visual disobedience. To close our eyes — though this is more a painkiller than a cure — and give the building's users the opportunity to sometimes close doors and windows to Tehran's auditory and visual pollution and retreat into their shell.

This is how the building acquired the ability to close its eyes. To attract attention and deliver a message to Tehran. A kind of permanent three-dimensional graffiti. A kind of Eastern protest, bashful and respectful, against the status quo.

COMPOSITE HANDICRAFT

Aluminum composite panels are breathing their last breaths these days: the inevitable result of fashionable and indelicate use of this material. In this project, we tried, before consigning composite to the dustbin, to employ it in an architecturally meaningful way. The movement details of the hard shell and composite facade lacquer were precisely designed for this specific project. This design of specific details for each project was, of course, indebted to our apprentice-like gaze at Tehran. We understood and employed composite the same way that the craftsman-architects of Tehran in the Peykan era understood and used rebar and iron profiles and concrete molds. Composite moved from being an error-concealing skin to becoming an active urban membrane — a membrane that knows how to change, to open and close its eyes, and to be alive.