At the Threshold of Not-being and Being

Add To Collection

Other Projects by SpaceScapeStudio

Add To Collection

Among Community, Between Communities

At the Threshold of Not-being and Being

Firm

SpaceScapeStudio

Type

Educational › University

STATUS

Concept

SIZE

1000 sqft - 3000 sqft

BUDGET

Undisclosed

This research-based design explores the relationship between internal and external references of a construction in order to raise a solid form to an art form, utilizing the inter-consciousness and inner-consciousness of architecture.

By preserving the identity of the historic Persepolis site, Shiraz University stands atop university hills and screams the cherish of traditional architecture thinking in a modern form. We were supposed to design the main gateway of this university. The aim behind providing analyses, 2d drawings, and 3d renderings in this project is not only to change the outlook on the role of the universities’ gateway on both city and university, and by some extent, citizens and academics but to leverage architecture as a semantic-driven tool to reveal the relation between the traditional and modern aspects of the infrastructures in the site. Thus, this research-driven design endeavors to look at the site of the project through the window of city and regional analysis to extrapolate the history and ideology of a nation for bringing on foreshadowed origins and, further than that, proposing “not to design” as a modus operandi to practice “design”. To this end, historical and societal poles in the site and the interpolar green corridor of Eram—some infrastructures central to this design—will be analyzed and discussed to foster our methodology. Our method to mix the traditional and modern aspects of the site is implementing the “no-design” architecture. Roughly, on “no-design” architecture, we opted for the reincarnation of metaphysics to accredit the true image of the Space.

The project is intrinsically comprised of two parts: a) research, and b) design. The research section falls at the intersection of Urban Structure, Built Infrastructure, and Higher Education of a city, which leverages Urbanism Research to result in an Architecture Design, overshadowing the Regional Planning of the context for both citizen and state. The design section attempts to understand the university gate entrance's role as a Built Infrastructure further than its status quo, especially in some countries such as Iran, where they are merely dedicated to academic atmospheres and act as a divider between “university” and “society”, “academics” and “citizens”. Indeed, our concept has principles that is reminiscent of spatial justice to the city; while its desire to develop a meaningful relationship between "city" and "university" calls for new frameworks of theory, in-person sensational and architectural explorations bring that theory into the physical realm through a rhythmic choreography of concrete slabs with the city, considering it as the gift of the design to the city symbolically.

The site from which the story will be recounted is Shiraz.

Mapping the History as a Utility for Unraveling the Story: Gradual Change of the Morphological Relationship between Social and Scientific Institutions in the Context of Intermontane Plain of Tirazziš (modern Iranian city of Shiraz) from Past to Present:
As a technique to analyze the relationship between societal functions and educational institutions from past to present in this city, we used figure-ground theory. This diagram, helped us to visualize how general contours of terrain separates city from its contemporary educational-making institution (Shiraz university). This ideology which is considered as the concept of [university] establishment by [its] founders and architects, screams the cherish of landscape thinking in its most euphoric state and our approach here, as planners, became solving the problem of this gap between society and university through the gateway in-between.

MYTHICAL NUCLEUS; the common core of a nation’s functions, institutions, and infrastructures:
These institutions, instructions, and functions are superimposed on each other followed by a common kernel that houses an iconic archetype of nationalism—the Imperial Authority. It is in them that one can meaningfully observe the entanglement of Iranian political, social, cultural, and by extent belief and educational systems that digest the very first conceptualization of the creation of the Pahlavi University. Leveraging the mined mythical nucleus, this urbanism research which leads to an architecture design parallels two kinds of these functions: I. Historical and II. Societal, highlighting the synthesis of these two as the key insight of the educational-institution–making process of the Pahlavi (Shiraz) University.

I. Historical institutions and the production of Space:
The Shiraz University Campus and its components of identity, which are embedded as the focal point of cultural activities at the highest point of the city, have served as a symbol of history during its 7 decades of foundation, both from their location and conceptualization. Its body is visible from almost every point of the city and bears resemblance to Pasargadae Lotus abstract notion. Utilizing Ricoeur’s “Ideology and Utopia”, this section aims to prove the pre-existing space created by this catalyzing point of stasis, manifesting political myth development of the Pahlavi Dynasty in a historical appearance. Throughout 3 stages of metamorphoses—Nationalization, Modernization, and Transpatialization—of Iran’s socio-spatial institutions, this concept remained intact, leading to an aristocracy of culture, a legacy which the city of Shiraz inherited.

II. Societal functions and the production of Space:
The Eram Garden Complex, which is painted as a motif of the entire gardens of the intermontane plain of Shiraz within the metropolitan fabric, has shaped a social life inside and around itself. This social life triggers deeper constructing meaning by citizens socially, intensified by the adjoining “Eram” green pedestrian-centric axis. By adopting the socio-spatial perspective (SSP), this section takes Lefebvre’s trichotomy of social production of immaterial space into account to argue that the linear promenade which is spatially “perceived” for daily routines and activities by citizens transforms into a “conceived” space in which the ‘gateway’ is not only for academics and those who are related to it in any way but it provides a subjective experience of social space shaped by symbols and personal emotions of those who “lived” it from the cityscape.

Manipulation of Leftover Space:
Our approach to this project was to practice “not to design”; therefore, instead of matter design, we struggled to prove the leftover spaces. These spaces were analyzed through two societal and historical institutions. By cross-referencing these two institutions against each other as the key insight of the production of Shiraz University, we unveiled an in-betweenness quality summoned in the form of an implied space at the gateway location which became subject to architectural manipulation.

Design Description:
“The design consists of numerous vertical slabs created from two major dimensions that are seen as “columns” from the front and are located at different levels of the “City” and the “University” in the form of “surfaces”. These two dimensions act as different references of the same construction, depending upon whether subject is leaving or approaching the monument. Consequently, its value is seen as being a partial strategy for an architecture of “depth”, whereas the other part is an architecture rooted in “width” as the main punctum of the urban frame. Surfaces with different levels in depth act as a social reference to the relationship between the city and the university that regardless of formal experiences lead visitors to a memorable experience due to sensory and psychological perceptions occurring by momentous single sequences in-between the surfaces. These multifaceted experiences are considered unique from person to person. The front façade, before having been read as a symbol for the university, act as a historical reference for the city and the green axis of Eram Blvd. embracing it; because before our determination of identity, it is existed in the presence of the Shiraz native landscape from Eram Blvd. to the heart of university, so that in bringing the meta-physical into the physical, the object begins to avoid concretizing anything that would cut the sky between the two. The implied space sitting between all slabs (from the city to the university) forces pedestrians to frame the university’s components of identity—dormitories and its central core on the top of university hill—as a catalyzing point of stasis. On the way back (from the university to the city) the same spatial consideration is retained, but the subject is confronted with a space in which the Sky and the Trees have reached each other on both sides.”

Embracing “Eram” green axis as an intrinsic element of Design:
By forging an architecturally-mediated discourse between the City and the University, the strategy behind the regional planning of the gateway places particular importance on the “Eram” Green Corridor, making this linear promenade integral to design. As seen from above and front in plan and façade, it ultimately provides an architecture of the unseen where mass is missed for citizens who encounter it from the cityscape. The missing mass is supplied by a frontal effect of the embodiment of a nation’s history, culture, ideological operation and political myth development of Imperial Authority sitting between concrete slabs. On the bottom line, these two pre-existing spaces construct a tangible connection between each other through theoretical frameworks proposed and backward reasoning applied, so that each dimension of the surfaces reveals the role of reciprocal reference, both within and between themselves. By utilizing a quality space comprised of passive and actual equality, the gateway triggers reflection, reinterpretation, and greater understanding of symbiotic relationship between inter-consciousness and intra-consciousness of an urban infrastructure where it stands between a monument addressing university within a city and a symbol reinforcing collective historical memory of a society.