Design Introduction
Plasco was a 17-story building located at heart of Tehran’s city center. This construction on Jomhouri Street at the northeast side of a main intersection called Istanbul collapsed on 19 January 2017 during a high-rise fire. The building had a 15 stories tower and a 5 stories podium. The tower part burnt down completely during the fire but the podium remained which will be restored as it was in upcoming years. On Oct 2018, a design competition was held openly for designing a new Plasco building as a perdurable national monument. This design awarded second place in the competition and after passing several assessments, it was selected for construction by the juries and client.
The “New Plasco Competition” requirements in addition to a 15-story tower and 5 basement levels with commercial use requested a memorial for martyrs of fire department. Following the restrictions and compact program in the building, the memorial part was the most flexible area to demonstrate the design concept. The ground floor due to the direct access to the adjacent pedestrian walkways and the fifth floor with its connection to the remained building rooftop were the most vibrant locations with proper potentials for housing the victim memorials. Therefore, in the proposed design the memorial space is showing up as a fluid stepped space connecting the first to the fifth floor.
Architectural Concept
This project does not directly refer to the tragic collapse. Realistic representation of the incident, instead of presenting an alive dynamic memory, captures a momentary picture and ruins it indeed. In this way, we evoked the abstraction. Abstracted architecture contributes to structure more than emphasizing on the Subject. This kind of approach that intrigues the latent qualities, which are ineffable, can be a generator in such projects. Though abstraction has a huge tendency to stand out, we kept the meaning more obvious. We were searching for new ways to elaborate the event and generate a new kind of meaning.
In the first step, reflecting the adjacent buildings’ proportions broke the initial cubic form of the building in to smaller pieces. The size and number of the segments transfer a sense of suspension and randomness. Moreover, number of segments does not imply to any specific point such as the number of martyrs or the date of the disaster. The project itself depict the event.
Fragmentation of the form drags the audience attention to the disaster. The fragments are suspended in a way that shapes a cavity at the center. This opening is the museum where separates the audience from the street chaos and lead them to the roof garden on the top of the 5 story existing building. In fact, the museum is the path that goes through the building and revive the memory in visitors’ minds. That is the reason why we cannot call this building a memorial project. It is more about a memory of an incident rather than a sculpture or monument.
Entering the building there are two pathways provided. One that drags the city vibrancy in to the commercial units and the other one that leads to the museum. The museum passage is a city extension offering a view to city along with silence, qualities that helps to define a new space experience. Unlike the typical museums that lack the natural light, presence of the light and its constant changes during the day helps the audience to feel the ongoing moment instead of seeing a skewed image of the past. This is an experience for both mind and body. In summary, rather than a dormant and static resemblance of what happened, an alive memory is hidden in the project and the focus point instead of the building itself is on the fluid spiral movement in the building.
Another consideration is the context and building interaction. A fixed platform transfers the safety and stability, but a suspended floor awake a sense of insecurity. In this design, the floor is sliced into different floating layers. The fluctuation of these floating floors spoils the sense of stability of the earth.
Team:
Architect: KRDS (Kourosh Rafiey Design Studio)
Team: Mohsen Yazdian, Shafagh Javidi, Mohammad Mehdi Safi, Zahra Zakariapour, Mehrnaz Mahdavi, Mohsen Soleymani, Ashkan Rafiey
Project Manager: Gozineh Consultant co.
Structure Consultant: Vahidgharekhani
Mechanical Consultant: Arabpour
Electrical Consultant: Afshar
Photography: Parham Taghiof
Material Used:
1. Facade cladding: GFRC
2. Flooring: Ceramic tile
3. Doors: Glass
4. Windows: Aluminum, window, Rayners
5. Roofing: Metal, Galvanized, Archmetal
6. Interior lighting: Lighting, Product, Sheed Lighting
