Principal Architecture and Designer: Mahdi Kamboozia
Architect and Project Manager: Helena Ghanbari
Renderings credits: PT-Visualization
The subject of the competition is the design of an urban pedestrian and cyclist’s pathway in the western part of the AbbasAbad hills complex in Tehran, between Valiasr Street (the most historic street in Tehran) and Jost-e-Joo Park. This is a route approximately 1.5 km long that crosses Gandhi and Nelson Mandela streets. That the project won second place in this competition.
In this project, we are faced with two issues: attracting the flux of people from the adjacent streets into the park and directing the users of the park to the passage to the edge of Valiasr Street.
For this purpose, from the starting point of the project to its end, due to the long path, it is necessary to create valuable stations that can motivate the users to continue their movement along the route. As a result, to change the range of functions from the park (sports-recreational area) to Valiasr Street (the cultural area), these stations were defined according to the taste of the surrounding users. Therefore, in order to connect the 4 main zones mentioned along the project path, attraction points are needed to attract the population to invite and direct the pedestrians like a domino with a cultural-social-sports narrative appropriate to the urban activities of each area. The idea of the project is to merge the designed path and functional platforms and create a formative complex (plastic) that can be controlled with a common language and it can be transformative and adaptive to different functions. The subject of how to define these 4 zones which shows each of them has an interactive-attractive narration in the city, would be discussed as follows.
Phase One: The project’s start point is located near the skating park, due to the significant crowd, which is mostly teenagers and families interested in street sports and recreational open-space activities. thus designed platforms include Calisthenics Ground, Bowling, Multy-purpose Sports ground and ...
Phase Two: In this phase, the way that the project interacts with Nelson Mandela Blv. is discussed since this boulevard is a route for cars, on the other hand, it is the only location where the west entrance of the park should be placed, and also, project’s extension from Palizvani street would be reached due to a bridge to this point. As a result, there needs to be a focal point to invite users including the bookstore and café.
Phase Three: Palizvani Street is a crowded street because of its administrative buildings, which include dense traffic. our solution is to create a separate path, one-meter-high and 4-meters-wide, that guides pedestrians and cyclists along with the project.
Phase Four: It is a complete cultural complex that includes the entrance platforms to the city gallery (sculpture symposium) located in the sixth dead-end of Gandhi and then extends in a ramp step to reach the edge of Valiasr Street, and by placing a bus station next to the project. On Valiasr Street, we will also connect the public transport flow to the project.