Redefining Boundaries:
Bonlad by Mohat Office in Ilam, Iran, emerges from a city marked by systemic neglect, spatial commodification, and the highest suicide rate in the country. In a context where urban land is built to full capacity—erasing open, shared, and breathable spaces—Bonlad intervenes not to beautify decay, but to rupture it. Through porous boundaries, fragmented courtyards, and rhizomatic layering, the project reframes architecture as political act and conceptual resistance. Bonlad does not resolve crisis; it reveals it. It reclaims marginality as terrain for encounter, bodily experience, and spatial imagination—resisting a logic that seeks to erase both meaning and life.
Key project details

The client’s request was unassuming: a two-unit family apartment. Yet its location—Ilam, a marginalized border city shaped by chronic neglect, economic sanctions, and war trauma—posed deeper questions. Here, architecture unfolds within a spatial pathology: unregulated full-site construction, commodified land, enclosed facades with shuttered windows, and a sociocultural matrix marked by gendered violence and the country’s highest suicide rate. In such a terrain, the absence of thresholds is not a technical omission—it is the symptom of an ontological fracture.
Rather than designing within constraints, Bonlad designs through them. The project operates as a spatial counter-gesture, deploying a “corrosive grid” where voids become active agents of erosion—gnawing at formal hierarchy, dissolving enclosure, and reclaiming boundary as event. The western edge, abutting a government building that forbade visibility, became a catalyst for a new typology: privacy without isolation, openness without exposure.
Architecture here resists the logic of erasure by orchestrating rupture. Fragmented courtyards, porous layers, and rhizomatic configurations transform the domestic unit from a sealed container into a site of encounter, ambiguity, and resistance. Construction relied on local labor and brick, not merely out of economy, but as a tectonic ethic—to inscribe slowness, care, and social agency into the wall itself.
Bonlad reimagines housing as a critical praxis. It does not conceal the city’s fragmentation—it inhabits it, renders it legible, and turns marginality into a spatial proposition.
How does the project showcase innovation?

Bonlad rethinks architectural innovation not as stylistic novelty, but as a mode of spatial resistance. Situated in Ilam—a city fractured by war memory, economic marginalization, and spatial erasure—the project responds to a chronic crisis where architecture has been reduced to sealed containers, built to the edge of every lot, deprived of thresholds, voids, or public interfaces. In this context, the challenge was not to create a new form, but to imagine an alternative way of thinking space.
The project introduces the concept of a “corrosive spatial grid”—a three-dimensional system in which fragmentation, void, and erosion are not failures but generative agents. Bonlad disrupts normative urban enclosure by reactivating the courtyard, not as nostalgic center but as spatial rupture. Boundaries dissolve into ambiguous, porous membranes. Circulation becomes choreography. The building’s body resists clarity—opening and closing with intention, creating experiential ambiguity that invites occupation, not control.
Innovation here is not about adding complexity, but about reclaiming the possibility of indeterminacy in a city defined by rigid certainties. The project does not solve Ilam’s spatial trauma—it inhabits it, intervenes in it, and makes it visible. Bonlad redefines domesticity as a condition of tension, encounter, and potentiality.
In doing so, it offers a radical alternative to the logic of consumption, enclosure, and silence—reasserting architecture as a critical, political, and imaginative act

How is the project beneficial?
PROJECT SIGNIFICANCE AND IMPACT:

Bonlad redefines social benefit not through token gestures of inclusivity, but through an architectural ethics of openness, ambiguity, and co-presence. In a city like Ilam—where housing typologies erase shared space, compress bodily experience, and reinforce social isolation—Bonlad reclaims architecture as a condition for encounter, dignity, and spatial belonging. Its porous boundaries, semi-open courtyards, and fractured thresholds offer new forms of inhabitation that prioritize collective experience and visual privacy without surrendering to enclosure.
The project’s inclusivity lies in its capacity to host multiple rhythms of life. It is not designed for users, but with an ethic of indeterminacy—allowing its spaces to be claimed, adapted, and redefined over time. Social benefit, here, is not delivered through fixed programs, but through spatial potentiality.
Environmentally, Bonlad resists the extractive logic of rapid urban construction. It employs locally sourced brick and relies on local labor—slowing down the building process to embed care, precision, and community involvement. This low-tech, high-attention approach reduces embodied energy, transportation emissions, and the alienation of labor. While no formal whole-life carbon assessment was conducted, the project’s compact footprint, passive ventilation strategies, and durable envelope collectively minimize operational demands.
Bonlad proposes sustainability as more than metrics—it enacts it as a spatial and cultural ethic. In doing so, it offers a model of housing that is not only materially responsible, but socially and existentially inclusive.