The Puff-Fuse Project is TAO Office's proposal for a design competition for Helal - the Iranian Company’s office building design - held in winter 2016, during the time the building's skeleton was being run on Taleghani Street in Tehran.
The building has 21 floors and consists of 6 basements, with an area of 2130.50 m².
The rapid growth of the Iranian population, the tendency of people to urbanization, and the increasing demand for housing have played an important role in shaping the urban landscape, to the extent Tehran has become a series of heterogeneous extrusions.
The existence of municipal rules and regulations in the construction industry is one of the reasons why the facade of these extrusions is so important.
All of these factors have reduced the importance of an urban building to a single facade, and eliminated the spatial value created by the form of a building. Likewise, the meanings that are conveyed to a building’s users, or the context they come from, appear worthless. Hence, we make a distinction between competitions for designing the facades of buildings and those for designing other spaces.
So, in this project we decided to distance ourselves from contemporary Iranian architecture stereotypes that see a building as merely a facade, with the outcome that we did not participate in the competition, and we did not submit our project to be judged, but we published it to clarify our criticism of the idea.
The matching of the physical program provided by the competition organizers with the literature in contemporary Tehran architecture and the difference from our aim of designing this project, led us to designing spaces appropriate to the demands and presenting a new physical program.
After making the above changes, we came to the conclusion that we needed to impose a public space on the project. This space is formed via extending the sidewalk into the project and using both Puff and Fuse techniques.
In the design process, we were looking for techniques corresponding to contemporary Tehran spaces.
The process of answering the question of which techniques can come from the city led us to choose these two techniques to produce this space; also, these two techniques express our criticism of the facade design by changing the dominant structures of Tehran before producing our desired space.
In order to criticize the idea of conquering space and the inappropriate physical program provided by the competition organizers, we reduced the density of the office cube via set back in two faces. So, our project is a combination of urban outdoor space along the sidewalk and a cube of required spaces: A space that is part of the city and where all people can use it, making it possible for different activities to take place.
Contemporary Tehran needs “Puffusion” rather than extrusions.