The Hidden Home

Mashhad, Iran

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The Hidden Home

Mashhad, Iran

Firm

DVR studio

Type

Residential › Apartment

STATUS

Built

YEAR

2024

SIZE

10,000 sqft - 25,000 sqft

Photos

Diman Studio (27)

Infill typology is defined by a generic box with definite boundaries, built edge-to-edge with adjacent buildings. It engages the city through a two-dimensional surface -the façade- and relates to its neighbors via side walls. Like a container, the program is injected in and it is then pocketed. The façade is later affixed to it like a decorative sheet. Just as Louis Kahn described, the plan is the society of rooms, the infill building uses its façade -the boundary shell- to conceal its interiority. This project attempts to emphasize the tension between surface and core, revealing the architectural dialectic between part and whole.
In such a dense urban context, the façade is no longer a mere outer skin. It becomes a wall that must simultaneously dialogue with the city and the interior. By observing the infill typology, the project challenges the inherent duality between the outer boundary and the inner program.
One of the key design strategies is breaking the cliché of the generic infill typology. In most urban buildings, balconies extend outward toward the city and the street view. However, the view is dead! In this project, balconies are intentionally rotated inward. Their longer edge now opens toward private interior spaces rather than the street. This shift transforms balconies from decorative, outward-facing platforms into intimate, inhabitable voids, redefining neighborly relationships not through shared walls, but through shared negative spaces.
Ultimately, the project responds to the chaos of the contemporary urban landscape by offering a redefinition of “view and privacy”, proposing a renewed quality of living within the urban infill spaces.
On the ground floor, the building steps back from the property boundary to create a semi-public zone offered to the city. This gesture is more than symbolic — it is an attempt to soften the hard edge of ownership and generate an interstitial space that belongs both to the public realm and to the residents; a space that is both inside and outside.
In this project, an effort has been made to use brick in a new and different way -both in terms of construction technique and formal expression- revealing new potentials of brick which has a historical background in Iranian architecture. The facade consists of two elements: rotatable louvers and inner boxes. The brick louvers are installed dry and separate from the inner core, acting like an outer curtain that creates privacy for the interior spaces. Each unit’s residents can open or close the louvers as needed, adding a dynamic, ever-changing quality to the facade. The brick pattern also, due to its unique arrangement and directional change on each floor, creates different forms during the day as the sunlight angle changes.