To replace what was once the first tower and the first shopping mall in a city's historical fabric is a sensitive task. Even more so since Plasco burned down in a tragic incident in early 2017. The proposal for rebuilding Plasco focuses on the significant role Plasco had as a symbol of Tehran's modernized social life. To this end, the project breaks the site down into a secondary street system attached to the very vibrant Jomhouri Street and expands on the urban life therein. The ground condition is designed to animate the pedestrian flow by the combination of an entrance plaza at street level and a network of sunken garden/linear retail below grade.
/with Albert Pope at Rice School of Architecture/
Built as a suburb of Hong Kong, Sha Tin has outgrown its original intent with almost 1 million population and the potential to become a primary urban node halfway between
Shenzhen and Hong Kong Island. Yet, the overwhelming banality of this suburban New Town supercedes any desire for alternative characterizations.
This project, undertaken as a group in Albert Pope's studio, aimed to understand Sha Tin's underlying structures, render them legible and propose a plan to realize
Sha Tin's latent potential for urbanity.
Tehran Museum of War
The competition brief called for a project that in addition to housing relics of war history, would operate as the background for military parades in the new town of Aftab in South Tehran. This proposal’s response is an architectural system that turns monumentality on its head, reimagines grandeur, and avoids spectacle. Repeating modules aggregate in a binary network of mass and void, dispersed on two overlaid grids with overlapping corners. The field composition creates a unified and continuous network that invokes the geometrical structure of courtyard buildings and while the serial reproduction displays sameness and coherence, the specific geometry of idiosyncratic roofs (and the resulting "arches" at each corner) produce moments of difference. The project thus negotiates between the universality of the grid system and the singularity of dispersed local modules.
/ Finalist in Villa Zarri Experiential Beer Garden Competition /
The typology of industrial buildings is characterized by structural repetition and open plan on the one hand, and rigidity of exterior enclosure on the other. This project utilizes erasure as a productive tool to strategically break the repetition in order to organize legible spaces inside the open plan. Three types of erasure are applied:
1. Axial: Erosion of enclosure creates a central spine that connects the idyllic natural landscape of the garden to the future urban developments in the South edge. This contracted axis provides a unique space for the tasting hall with contrasting views on each end.
2. Centripetal: The extroversion of the spine is complemented by an introverted loop on two levels of retail and restaurant that circles around the interior courtyard and multi-function space.
3. Tangential: The erosion at the north side creates a terrace overlooking the garden. This subtle intervention transforms the north edge from a dull blank surface and activates the visual connection to the garden while rendering the new program visible.
Edited by Nashid Nabian, the 101st issue of Memar Magazine reflects back on its history in identifying a new generation of architects in Iran and includes essays by Nader Tehran and Antoine Picon among other prominent figures. Criticality Redux is an effort to situate these practices vis-a-vis the discursive history of criticality in architecture and articulate the political underpinnings of recent "formalist" trends of architecture in Iran.
/ With Troy Schaum at Rice School of Architecture /
From primitive hut to Le Corbusier's Domino, Structure has played a significant role in the way we conceive our habitat. While the modernist cube allowed architecture to achieve dense housing blocks for the growing population, contemporary (suburban) city suffers from lack of density and is characterized predominantly by voids and excess of space. This project attempts to utilize lightweight composite materials to produce an alternative equation between mass and space in the city and thus grounds the tectonic in a socio-political context. Mass and void are thus not perceived as a distinct binary, but organically bound components of a singular system where one is inherently producing the other.
At Mark Wamble's Studio, Rice University
Fall 2012
The unitary yet nuanced geometry of diagrid systems can produce various spatial conditions. By concentrating the structural load of the building on the perimeter, the project creates labyrinthine interior sections, punctuated by intermediary levels that will account for the legibility of accommodated programs.
