The project was defined as building a traditional guesthouse in the historic fabric of Shiraz's Sang-e-Siah neighborhood, situated between and alongside five nationally registered buildings from the Ilkhanid, Zand, Qajar, and Pahlavi historical periods. In recent years, projects for revitalizing the fabric have been based on a demolition-and-consolidation strategy, which by removing fine-grained buildings, eliminating passageways, defining large-scale projects, and cutting streets has gradually destroyed the proportions of solids and voids, the geometric and connective system of passages, and the structure of a significant portion of the historic fabric.
This project is an effort to experience urban renewal and offer a strategy for its propagation within the fabric — in a way that transforms the social and cultural structure and generates renewed life. However, the main problem in fabric renewal is contending with pseudo-historical patterns favored by decision-making authorities, who seek to create imitations of the original through familiar codes and decorations. We endeavored to keep the project free from prevailing codes and motifs, and in the path of revitalizing the fabric, to propose a strategy of plot-by-plot (rhizomatic) propagation of life within the body of the fabric.
Instead of consolidating plots and defining a large-scale complex, we envisioned the annexation of buildings. Despite limited financial resources and the impossibility of acquiring all at once, we began the design with an initial core and planned for expansion to adjacent plots and ultimately its spread through the fabric. During the construction of the initial core, two adjacent plots were acquired based on early projections and are now under construction, with several more plots in the acquisition and design phase. The decision to annex rather than consolidate allows the project to remain alive forever — fine-grained elements with their same positions and proportions connect to larger assemblies for different functions, and passages at different levels reproduce the external connective network within.
The propagation of life plot by plot is a proposal for revitalizing the historic fabric, yet it will always remain unfinished. Unfinished, with a hidden and constant desire for expansion. Along its rhizomatic path of dissemination, wherever this project finds a valuable building, it restores and revives it; wherever it finds a building lacking conservation value or a plot of land, it will design and construct a building in dialogue with the fabric, with an understanding of proportions, geometry, and the solids and voids of masses — striving, like the surrounding historic buildings that represented the technology and needs of their era, to be representative of its own age in connection with its context.