Cedar project is located in one of the authentic neighborhoods in the east of Tehran, and in an alley that has been famous for the evergreen trees for ages. There was a villa house in the project site like all the side blocks. The structure of the house was a one-story building overlooking a yard with a small garden and fruit trees in front of it.
Now, the passage of time has changed the structure of the neighborhood and most of the villa blocks have been replaced by apartments and due to the value of land and apartment prices in recent years. Albeit there is lack of quality of the old villa spaces.
Here the project is trying to looking at some of these lost qualities, and provide a more suitable space for living in this structure (apartment living).
We started the design process from the most prominent part of the old houses, i.e. the yard. In the past, the presence of the yard and garden in front of the house, created external qualities, moreover was considered as a benefit for the internal spaces.
Therefore, we thought that in the section of residential floors, we could associate the past image of the “window to the yard” for each of the units to some extent, by creating a common external possibility called a terrace.
The interpretation of it has been changed as a small yard surrounded by an evergreen tree and a visual connection to the interior spaces.
Despite the limitations of the site, we considered the half-space lobby in the common area in order to create a more fluid connection between the building and the main courtyard space in the form of a gradient by constructing a spatial hierarchy.
In the next step, we went to the facade and tried to inject the extension of green space into the facade shell through creating gaps and layering it, and in this way, increase the environmental qualities from the inside and outside perspective.
In the facade design, the floors are slightly overlapped in order to create a green space and bring more belonging to the residents of each unit due to the visual variety of colors.
Brick texture was used in the facade of an old villa building; we also tried to use the brick texture in a more contemporary way so that both the new child has more color and smell of his parent; as well as to link the horizontal structure of the floors to a series of vertical lines. By designing abstract axes, the overlapped floors Slipped on top of each other and placed in a more balanced arrangement.
Type: Residential
Location: Tehranpars, Tehran, Iran
Client: Eng Ahmadi
Principal Architects: Shahab Ahmadi, Iman Hedayati
Design Team: Shahab Ahmadi, Iman Hedayati, Niloufar Mohammadzadeh, Maede Massah, Ali Ahmadi, Ali Bazzazan, Mitra Mohammadi
Construction: Hasht Architects
Graphic: Ali Ahmadi, Niloufar Mohammadzadeh, Shaghayegh Beirami
Photography: Mohammad Hasan Ettefagh
Area: 312 m2
Status: Built
Date: September 2021