BENETTON TEHRAN HQ

CONCEPT | 2009

Beyond the local and global freedom of political and religious expression, the deepest form of individual expression is determined by layers of intimacy between ourselves and our surroundings.

Capturing the complex energy of rich Persian Culture and modern Tehran, our strategy is to manifest the current political and social environment, while setting a semi-private/public stage for future generations. The design is a platform celebrating the adjacency between commercial/cultural, residential/office, private/public, and women/man, implementing multiple layers of intimac(it)y.

If modernity is defined by a timeless condition, a building has to decide at birth how it wants to age.  Inspired by the specificity of the location and the traditional crafts of Persian and Islamic culture, our starting point is the geometric rationality of the infinite grid. We have taken a classic eight-point star Islamic pattern and made it into a three-dimensional lattice. 

The Islamic pattern art form expresses the logic and order inherent in the vision of the universe. Geometric ornamentation in Islamic Art suggests a remarkable amount of freedom in its repetition and complexity. It offers the possibility of infinite growth and can accommodate the incorporation of other types of ornamentation as well.

Driven by a religious passion for abstraction and the related doctrine of unity, Muslim intellectuals have recognized in geometry the unifying intermediary between the material and the spiritual world.

Our next step merges the three-dimensional lattice with the given Benetton program, the Intruder. In this intersection, the project appears with two conditions inside the veiled prism: the solid and the void. The resulting spaces, like Mahtabis, are the junction between programs; they are the continuation of the interior to the exterior, connecting the building to the street.

The result is a compact yet exploded typology, allowing visual and physical connections through the voids between the three programs: shopping, working and living.  These differing degrees of intimacy are revealed tectonically through lattice, glass, and stone.

The building will provide several “shared spaces”, both private and public, to stimulate the interaction between user and client. The inner public spaces will be able to host communal gathering activities such as exhibitions, parties, fashion shows and video screenings. They will become an active part of the cultural and public life of Tehran. The main entrance – the piazza – is the central ”orientation point”, allowing views into the heart of the building, providing glimpses of another world, filtered through opaque/semi-opaque/transparent layers…a view into another intimac(it)y.