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Architects: Criteria Group
- Area: 1100 m²
- Year: 2023
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Photographs:Solo Studio
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Manufacturers: Arend, Label, Midea, New Pipe, Plus Beton, Tabriz
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Lead Architects: Kazem Hooshmand, Ali Moqtaderi
Text description provided by the architects. In Tehran's “Ab o Atash” Park, near the Tabiat Bridge, there was a building that used to be a stable for horse keeping. Our project involved the renovation and change endeavor of this building from a stable to a coworking space and revitalizing it. The transformation from a stable to a coworking space was attractive and exciting. The stable building, abandoned for years, required extensive repairs and refurbishment. While preserving the overall form and facade of the building, we aimed to maintain its identity and give it a new social character by making changes to the interior spaces.
Given that the building was surrounded by a dense park and located near one of the city's main highways, creating windows to bring the positive ambiance of the surroundings into the interior space was of the most importance. Therefore, we decided to create circular windows along the ground floor to ensure that users do not feel disconnected from the outside environment. Additionally, by opening up skylights, we sought to increase the penetration of natural light into the complex.
Due to the considerable length of the ground floor, we created two elliptical spaces in the plan to introduce spatial separation in a way that the uninterrupted elongated shape of the plan would not visually dominate the space. These created ellipses played an important role for us, with one as the entrance and partitioning area and the other as a rest space and atrium. To ensure the internal courtyard had suitable views from all sides, we designed permeable walls and constructed them using handcrafted concrete blocks. Making these blocks on the site was crucial to the project execution. We designed and fabricated a metal frame to make these blocks and chose polymer concrete as the material.
Approximately 2,000 concrete blocks were made on the site during various construction operations, which became one of the project's strengths. Now, after the reopening of this building, numerous teams are engaged in daily activities and work in this space. This use change has brought the building back into the economic and social cycle of “Ab o Atash” Park.
