A Design for the Facade of Qom Commercial Complex

University of Tehran, Faculty of Fine Arts, Department of Architecture, Tehran

Project idea

This project was located on an old neighborhood close to the traditional Bazar in city of Qom; Iran. The most important point in form finding for the facade of this building was to consider the microfiber context of the project site. Given the fact that our under design commercial building was subject to much larger dimensions than its neighboring buildings, it was considered in the design of the facade that the large limb of the building should be crushed into smaller elements. This approach to the facade of the building -contrary to the typical design of commercial buildings, which emphasizes on the transparency and integrity of the facade- led the final form of facade to be as fractional as possible. Meanwhile, the architectural plan of none of the floors were similar to each other so it was obvious that the elevation of none of the floors would look like each other. The main access to the building was located on the north side of the site, which was used as a concept to draw the focus of all the sides of the building towards this passage.
Due to the location of this project in the city of Qom, which is a desert city, the openings of the facade were designed in such a way that the light did not penetrate directly into the building so the light is received through the louvers and windows rotated toward the north side of the site.

Project description

In its initial phase, the project merely included a design for the facade of the building. When I and my colleagues (Sepidar Design Studio) were invited to this project, the implementation of the concrete structure was almost completed, but the employer was not satisfied with the facade designed by the previous architect and preferred a new architect to work on it again. So we started. Our team evaluated the status of the project. Soon we understood due to the former progress of the project, it was not possible to change architectural plans and sections of the building because of economic and technical issues. In fact the design problem of this project was redefined in this way: Given what all the aspects of the project's situation were at that time, what would be the form of the facade that would meet the needs and demands of such a project? The ideas and concepts mentioned in the previous section were the answer to this question.

Technical information

I wanted to upload architectural drawings here but couldn't find how to!

Co-authors

Sepidar Design Studio architecture team: Hoseyn Sepehri, Mahdi Tavakkolian, Amirreza Ardekani