The project is located at municipality district 6 in downtown of Tehran, Iran. As Alvand street is a district with administrative Potential and the employer intended to sell the whole building to be used as headquarters of a medium private company, therefore, the employer decided to have the main façade rebuilt in a distinguished effective way.
Alvand office Building is located in a site with the area of 450 sqm, situated in the 29th alley, Alvand St., and has a built area of 4800 m2. It is a 10-storey building. Three underground floors and one ground floor are allocated to parking lots, and six others have administrative application with two apartments of 250 m2 and 180 m2 on each. It was a building with steel structure with an external finishing composed of stone and wood. Its chilling system is consisted of channel split units and its heating facilities are boiler room with hot water coils completed in 2014.
The facade has an inappropriate external view made of wood and stone, i.e. cream travertine. There were horizontal bands and a vertical band of gray travertine on the right side of the external view around the windows, together with three wooden boxes around the windows on the 2nd, 4th and 6th floors.
As the employer had spent lots of money to construct and finish the project, he intended to have the said external view rebuilt in the shortest time possible. Having visited the project and seen the entrance fences, parking lots, height problems of ramps as regards passing easily without bending heads, which problems were needed to be rectified, the designer proposed to rebuild them and managed to change the employer’s opinion and it was arranged to complete all alterations during three months spending roughly IRR 1500 million. Therefore, the employer decided to rebuild the project having major modifications of the preceding composition of the external view as the main intervention. So, the project began in July 2015 and was to be completed by October 2015.
As a short time was available and all windows were to open as in the preceding view, the designing group encountered with a rectangle body whose width was the width of the land, roughly 14 m, and whose length was the height of the building, roughly 23 m, together with three openings with different and completely inhomogeneous dimensions. As the building was to be sold in whole as headquarters of a private company and to be the unique sign of such company, therefore, the most essential concern of the design was creation of an integrated view with a homogenous volume surrounded by a relatively disordered neighborhood.
The project began with analysis of the texture of surrounding buildings. Gray ceramic was used as a neutral material for the background of the main view. To take into consideration the strength of the steel structure of the building, to avoid increasing its load to the extent possible, and to prevent increases in dead loads, we chose all material as prefabricated ones to be connected with bolts and nuts. To do this, ceramics were connected to the external view by an aluminum background connected to the steel structure with the above joints. So, the project, as a gray volume, was distinguished from the surrounding relatively light texture.
As there were existed openings from the past and the employer didn’t intend to make changes in them, and as the rebuilt elevation was on the south side of the building, we decided to adjust the light penetrating into the apartments, and to use shades and light to diversify interior spaces. Thus, we used aluminum louvers cut by CNC to reduce light during working hours and to convert the interior spaces to a pleasant diverse space for inhabitants because of shades created. Then, in order to have an integrated external view, we used vertical elements to create visual connection between all floors as well as six horizontal elements made of steel plates to separate floors one form another.
Finally, taking into consideration the ramps existing in the courtyard to access to the ground floor and underground ones as parking lots and as there were no adequate green space, we tried to increase the per capita green space. Therefore, we decided to distribute flower boxes on floors to provide the least normal space on floors and also to make nicer the view to some extent in contrast with the urban texture. So, we placed almost four flower boxes behind windows of every floor and used falling plants, such as Japanese humble plants, to make nicer sights for passers-by and to create beautiful scenes of flower vases for inhabitants.
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