«(…)Architecture is a full space which delimitate an empty space, or it’s the void that takes shapes from the built, from the architecture. Although, the void can be conceived as the place from which you can glaze the shape, the architecture. And this void is the shape, it’s architecture (…)» (from “Architecture of the spirit”)
The meaning of the persian word “Teheran” is “to go down, toward the low, the bottom”. This moving sense influences the concept of the building. The parallelepiped is initially emptied “from the top to the bottom”, scoured in its south corner, then pushed towards the inside, as pushed by a fingertip which generates its flexuous interior paths and the functional services which faces on these. The plasticity of the south façades, whose sinuous lines recall the Arabian script, conflicts with the formal regularity of the other elevations. The façade that embrace and characterize the building with its own spatial and formal qualities is entirely out of glass, and runs around the whole building. The modular laminated glazing panel is composed with two laminated glasses with an interior punched copper film, which, beside the characterization, provide the building with a solar filter. The glazing walls and their transparency provide the building with permeability. Exterior images and the interior life mix up together. The exterior volumetric image can be equally sensed also from the interior side. The interior partitions following smooth curved moves embrace and conduct the visitor through out his path. The policy adopted for the retail units lead to a direct and informal approach. Transparent glazing that allow the perceiving of the inner space also from the exterior sidewalk. The directional areas have been conceived as a sequence of comfortable and softly flexible spots as the common areas integrating one into the other. In the core of the open patio generated in the south “void” of the building a garden-square with a font, as in the ancient persian gardens whose location was necessarily conditioned by the presence of a spring: the spring water as the soul of the garden; the fanciful shapes of the fountains as the heart of the garden with which all other elements of the surrounding were integrated and connected. The design green area flows out from the garden-square and rise up on the elevations of the building, as for restoring and return back to the earth each lump stolen for the construction of the building.
