Finalists: Public Buildings

Finalists: Public Buildings — 17th Memar Award

Twenty projects competed in the Public Buildings category of the 17th Memar Award (1396 / 2017). Five reached the finalist stage — works that did not place in the medal tier but were still chosen by the jury as the strongest examples of Iranian public architecture that year. The five span scales and programs as different as a 15-square-metre guard kiosk on a mountain road and a 4,400-square-metre insurance headquarters: a roadside restaurant in Lavasan, a coastal office-commercial complex on Kish Island, a re-imagined warehouse on the Alborz plain, the corner-block insurance headquarters in Isfahan, and the small corten guard kiosk at the entrance to Minousa Small Town. The texts and facts below are transcribed from the original 17th Memar Award supplement (Memar 106, Mehr–Aban 1396).

Moallem Insurance Headquarters, Isfahan

USE Studio — Mohammad Arab, Mina Moeineddini, Elaheh Hajdaei

Location: Apadana 2 Street, corner of Bahman Alley, Isfahan
Client: Moallem Insurance
Design associates: Milad Alidousti, Amir Safa, Mahla Ebrahimpour, Parisa Goli
Construction: Bahman Paydar Sepahan Ltd.
Supervision: Mehdi Mirbod
Structure: Karimian
Electrical: Alireza Javi
Mechanical: Farokhpour
Furniture: Mohammad Javad Shadram
Photo: Ehsan Hajirasouliha
Site area: 465 m²
Total built area: 4,400 m²

Seven axonometric diagrams of the building skin — Seven axonometric stages — Panel, Function, Console, Regulations, Structure, Penetrations, Transparency — describing the formation of the building skin.

Office corridor with full-height glazing along one side — An office corridor — full-height glazing on one side filtered through the louvered skin.

Courtyard with a tree looking up at the cantilevered louvered volume — Looking up from the courtyard at the cantilevered, louvered volume that floats above a black stone base.

Entrance & Security, Minousa Small Town, Gilavand

Kourosh Rafiee

Location: Hasht Behesht development, Minousa Small Town, Gilavand
Client: Minousa Small Town
Design associates: Mohsen Yazdian, Ameneh Karimian, Elahe Barani
Construction: Benda Co.
Structural design: Vahid Gharekhani
Total built area: 15 m²

Minousa Small Town is a weekend-getaway village in a mountainous region, comprising more than one hundred plots and itself part of a larger development called Hasht Behesht. The plots are to be built as low-density villas, so the green mountain landscape will remain dominant. Several buildings have already been built in the town, and a strong security system is essential for residents' peace of mind.

Beyond its primary function of controlling entry and exit on the ground floor with a sleeping space on the upper level, this guard kiosk is a powerful iconic volume. Its three-cornered shape was generated by carving slices from the path of incoming vehicles. The metal volume reads as a mark of solidity, and the central section is cut open onto the entry road, acting like an eye.

The skin that separates inside from outside is built up in layers. The outer skin of raw iron with no surface coating lets the building register as one of nature's elements, with the passage of time visible on its surface. The next layer is the structural grid, which carries the load. A thermal-insulation layer holds the indoor environment, and finally a plaster layer is finished with an appropriate paint.

Corten guard kiosk on a stone platform overlooking the mountain road — The corten guard kiosk sits on a stone platform above the entrance road. The central horizontal cut frames the view back down toward Gilavand.

Two views of the kiosk — pointed side and front entrance with glass — Two views of the kiosk — the pointed side that registers the geometry of the carved volume, and the front with its glass entrance and rear ladder up to the sleeping floor.

View from inside the kiosk through the central glass cut — Looking out through the central glass cut — the "eye" that monitors movement on the entrance road and the rolling landscape beyond.

System Company Warehouse, Alborz

Mehran Khoshroo

Client: System Ceramic Iranian, Payam Khalili
Design team: Niloofar Esmaeili, Reyhaneh Miraftab, Nastaran Namvar, Samin Mostafaei
Structural design: Pedram Zarpak
Mechanical: Ali Ghanizadeh
Electrical: Ali Piltan
Construction: Soroush Alipour
Supervision: Javad Hadavandi
Site area: 2,100 m²
Total built area: 1,500 m²

This project re-reads a common industrial diagram — the pairing of a warehouse for ceramic-machinery parts with its service spaces, housed in a cheap steel-frame shed. The challenge became elevating the quality of the large, low-traffic warehouse space, linking it to other spaces and breaking with the area's predictable stereotype. By wrapping the entire structure in a white cocoon, the transformation of a shed that did not want to be a shed began. In this process, the external skin — based on the triangular geometry of the structure — grew over every function so that a unified form emerged, suggesting a kind of dynamism.

The service building sits inside the warehouse like a transparent cargo box — a living creature whose inner mechanism is visible: a box within a box. The interior, like the exterior, is white and unadorned; only the plants and the opaque masses of the service spaces are coloured. The first is a slice of nature in an industrial space, the second a product of the very production line the project was built to support.

System Company Warehouse — exterior view of the white triangulated skin — The exterior — a white cocoon of triangular panels grown over the steel shed.

System Company Warehouse — wider view of the building in its plain context — Read against the flat Alborz landscape, the white cocoon breaks decisively with the area's industrial stereotype.

Warehouse interior — box-in-box service volume inside the larger hall — Inside the warehouse — the service volume sits like a transparent box within a box, its mechanism left visible.

Barcode Office-Commercial Complex, Kish

Eivan Architectural Studio, Amir Afghan

Location: Hormoz Square, beginning of Iran Boulevard, Kish
Client: Amin Jalalpoor
Design team: Ila Kabgani, Hamed Akhavizadegan, Atiyeh Keshavarz, Arash Hosseinzadeh
Project manager: Eivan Architectural Studio
Building construction: Ghorbanali Teimouri
Facade construction: Hossein Solhivand
Mechanical & electrical consultant: Saeedeh Eslami, Leila Yarmohammadi
Structure: Mohammad Varzaneh
Photo: Deed Studio
Site area: 1,200 m²
Total built area: 3,198 m²

In designing this complex, given the land use and its commercial value (while respecting the lot-coverage and urban setback limits), a pure glass volume in three storeys was conceived.

The project's design strategy is a skin that, by wrapping the entire volume, gives it a symbolic character and allows the amount of light entering the interior and the view from inside to outside to be controlled across four distinct northern, southern, eastern and western elevations. This skin is mounted at a distance from the first skin (the glass facade), so that the partition between inside and outside becomes a green in-between space. Because of the irregular form of this in-between space, the office units — despite a regular arrangement, identical plans and similar areas — feel entirely different from one another.

To deal with heat and to control daylight and shade, the skin — inspired by traditional architectural patterns of southern Iran — takes the form of a lattice that rotates around the pure glass volume in a swirling movement, influenced by the vehicular flow around Hormoz Square, and shapes the facade.

Barcode complex — exterior corner view and interior with folding glass partitions — Left: the building's corner read from the gravel forecourt — the lattice skin rotates around the glass volume below. Right: inside, folding glass partitions with vertical fins replay the facade pattern at room scale.

Three views: terraced corner, glazed corridor with planters, atrium with stair — Three views of the in-between green space: the terraced corner with cantilevered planters, the glazed corridor running along the lattice, and the double-height atrium where the stair rises behind vertical fins.

Concrete Restaurant, Lavasan

Hamed Badri Ahmadi

Location: Imam Khomeini Boulevard, corner of Morvarid Alley, Lavasan
Client: Mohammad Zooei
Design team: Neda Vaziri, Fatemeh Shariati, Parastu Piray, Hanieh Safari, Kaveh Dadgar
Structural design: Siavash Sedighi
Electrical & mechanical: Arash Mojabi
Construction: Mohammad Zooei
Supervision: Boozhgan Studio
Photo: Deed Studio, Ali Daghigh
Graphic: Neda Vaziri, Mana Ghabusi, Mina Rahimipour
Site area: 790 m²
Total built area: 540 m²

The brief was simple: design a building with a specified floor area on a limited budget — a small structure with two main storeys and a mezzanine that could fit within the main dining hall.

In the design, the attempt was to make architecture the same as structure and structure the same as architecture; the structural elements were treated as exposed, and with the addition of elements such as glass, ceramic flooring and service fixtures, the project's outlines took shape. Within the entry frame, hand-made coloured tiles were used to soften the volume and add a human scale, and the image of the volume lifting up off the ground was turned into a reflecting pool.

The restaurant is defined on three levels. Level −1 holds service spaces — kitchen and staff areas of the restaurant's public service. The ground level is the main dining hall, and the mezzanine is a reception space. Circulation, beyond enabling the program to function and meeting restaurant standards, is itself part of the experience of being in the restaurant — a foregrounded element.