Politically, Qom it’s one of the most important international origins for Muslim theologians. Qom is characterized by religious ceremonies and events which bring pilgrims and tourists every year to participate in events or worship the in the holy shrine of Masoume. The poor quality of the existing hotels creates a shortcoming of accommodations and transforms the function of the residential fabrics around the shrine to transitory accommodations. This transformation provides a change in performance of the super block between the holy shrine and Qom Public Mosque to a location of interactive events for tourists.
Overview: The project brief was to desig a mixed use complex including retails stores, hotels, offices, and convention center, in a land with 30k sqm area. According to the influence of this program presence in the middle of the super block (i.e. traffic and scale), this complex has the potential to change and unbalance the behavior and character of the context. The context gains its unique character from its urban spaces with the origins of the religious events and activities between the contexts of the fabric cells. Result in the future of those events in its fluidness without a sharp form and take the shape of the spaces around. So the most important strategy to designing such a complex, is to keep the context of public spaces and connectivity following the context behavior.
Design Idea: As the design strategy lead the project to follow the site behavior and connections, the most important factor in maintaining this connection is the scale. As we assumed the context to be a living organism with a specific character the project volume needed to be generated and organized by the context cells stemming from the context growth. Accordingly, the context fabric cells grow into the site to organize the ground floor with the same behavior, scale, and accessibility, to spawn the complex commercial center like a bazar with a loop of retails to generate a central void. This void is completely open to the city through the perforated retail spaces that acts as a public space with the potential to be transformed to a public, open, space for events and religious ceremonies. The following cells were stacked, which grow vertically, to create the other functions spaces of hotels, offices, and convention spaces.
The outcome is a project that is not disconnected from the super block public root, but it is a democratic project that from one side, connects the urban arterials through the ground floor bazar, and from the other side, provides an accessible urban space for the city of Qom.
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