Although Hadi Mirmiran's architectural designs are very many and well known, and even carry a particular style and manner that is unlikely to be confused with anyone else's work, beyond his early designs at Pulad Shahr — belonging to the late 1340s SH (Memar 3) — and the design of the extension to the Housing and Urban Planning building of Esfahan Province in recent years, no executed work of his — and especially his many competition-winning designs — had been seen for a long time. Lovers of his work are now very pleased that two of his designs, presented in this issue, have just been completed, and that two further designs of his (the Tehran Provincial Office building and the Export Development Bank) have begun construction.
Seyyed Hadi Mirmiran: Latest Works
01
Rafsanjan Sports Complex
Client: Vali-Asr University of Rafsanjan, Office for the Publication of Revolutionary Studies. Designer and project manager: Seyed Hadi Mirmiran. Technical manager: Hamid Mirmiran. Design group: Mozhdeh Hasanvali, Homa Sasan. Construction managers: Mohammad Tofigh, Mousa Rezaei Shoushtari. Supervision: Saeid Pahlavanzadeh. Structure: Bahram Mozhdehi. Spatial structure: Sazeh-haye Fazaii Iran Co. Mechanical: Abnouran Co. Construction: Keyson Co., Rasta Co.
The Rafsanjan Sports Complex, with slight changes in the idea and a complete change in interior function, is the design that won first place in the 1373 (1994) competition for the design of the Museum and Document Centre of the Presidency, but in place of which another design was built. Mirmiran's design was prepared again in 1375 (1996) for the building of a sports complex near that same museum, and was put into execution.
The site of the design is a right-angled trapezoid of about 7,500 square metres, lying west of the Cultural-Sports Complex of Rafsanjan. The building has two main parts: the indoor and outdoor swimming pools and the sports halls (gymnastics, squash courts, badminton, and a multi-purpose hall). The built area is about 3,500 and the landscaping about 4,000 square metres, and the surface of the open-air pool is 560 square metres.
The architecture of the complex takes its model from the architecture of the traditional Kerman ice-houses (yakhchāl) — examples of which still survive in Rafsanjan — and has succeeded, without imposing any limit on use, in fitting it to a contemporary function and method of construction. Like the spatial composition of the traditional ice-houses, the complex is composed of an opaque part — the great conical dome — and a transparent part — a wide, sloped glass roof above the pool, leaning on a long, tall wall. The sloping glass roof is a reading of the shadow of the long ice-house wall on the ground. The entrance space connects these two opposing external aspects from within and brings them together, beginning at the centre of the cone and stretching out a great transparent canopy to the ground; its arm bends, in answer to the curve of the cone, and closes.
Worth noting is that the variety of needed spaces — dry sauna and massage pits, body-building, changing rooms, showers, sanitary services, the trainer's room and, in the basement, the engine and treatment plant; on the ground floor the buffet, the shop, the spectators' gallery and the administration; and in a mezzanine overlooking the pool the restaurant — has not disturbed the simple, clean overall space produced by the joining of one long, tall wall and a cone. The exterior simplicity of the building is also present in the whole interior space and in its many subdivisions. The directness, soundness, simplicity and brevity that are Mirmiran's habitual manner, in a work built in a remote corner of the country with limited construction means, prove the practicability and the maturity of his manner of design.
02
Tehran Bar Association building
Client: Tehran Bar Association. Designer and project manager: Seyed Hadi Mirmiran. Technical manager: Hamid Mirmiran. Design group: Homa Sasan, Mozhdeh Hasanvali. Construction managers: Naser Shahsavari, Mohammad Tofigh, Mousa Rezaei Shoushtari. Control: Kamran Sheikh-Hassani, Gholamhossein Sharifzadeh. Metal facade: Masoud Arabshahi. Structure: Jamal Lalehparvar. Mechanical: Abnouran Co. Contractor: Mahdasht Construction Co.
The Tehran Bar Association building — four storeys above the ground floor, with two basements, totalling 4,700 square metres of built area, on a rectangular east-west site of 8 × 29 metres (972 square metres) near Argentine Square in Tehran — has just been completed. Designed for the various activities of the lawyers belonging to the Bar, the building has administrative, educational, regulatory and professional functions.
The exterior image of the building, which displays a modern reading of the scales of justice — once in the figure of two equal great weights and again in the figure of a great beam of equal weights — is at the same time the outward reflection of the floating of the whole building in space. In fact, the four storeys of work above the ground floor compose two suspended vertical bodies, surrounded on every side by transparency and light, except at the point where the topmost floor connects to the side walls.
The sense that the floors are floating, and that space surrounds on all sides, begins as soon as one enters the ground floor and sees the underside of the floors; it is intensified as the eye is drawn to the sky through the gap between the two bodies — a gap that opens wider as it rises — and is completed by being on the floors themselves and walking through the surrounding corridors that do not touch the side walls. The repeated sight of the gap between floor and corridor wall sustains the feeling of floating in space.
Beyond the imaginative quality of work-offices floating in the middle of space, the designer has also been able, on a long east-west site, to provide the necessary light for all the spaces on every floor while avoiding the troublesome western light. For this reason the use of transparent surfaces in the exterior and interior elevations is in no way contrived, but is the honest reflection of the architectural needs of the design.
The artistic finish of the surface of the two suspended bodies in copper and brass — which play the part of a rival and intensifier to the surrounding transparent, empty space — has at the same time made them a complement to the role-playing of the glass surfaces in an urban view. This copper and brass finish is also continued inside, taking on the decoration of the inner foyer.
The black granite of the ground-floor pavement is a single sheet on whose hard surface all the plays of light and colour, and the central axis of the whole space, are defined.
In the Bar Association building we again clearly see Mirmiran's manner of working with the space itself and its large-scale composition, in the basic confrontation between two fundamental formal elements — full and empty, black and white, night and day, vertical and horizontal — and the spreading of the formal effects of this fundamental confrontation into functional space. A manner that stands fully opposite the manners of composition.