Project Name: SHAMSE
Architecture Firm: VIRAFORM
Firm Location: QOM, ISLAMIC REPUBLIC OF IRAN
Completion Year:2017
Gross Built Area:2800 square meter
Lead Architects: REZA JAFARI
Photo credits: Ali Esmaeili
Clients: Hosein Eslamian
Engineering: Ali Goli
In this project, a father and his three sons were supposed to live together as a family in a building apartment close to each other. In fact, the dialogue with the history of the site, the climate, as well as the remaining values in the traditional lifestyle of Qom, formed the project concept as Shams.
The space organization of the project is based on traditional family life. The idea of Iranian traditional house in organizing levels of privacy for the users inspired us to replace the space inside and outside traditional houses in the form of spatial flexibility in the apartment, so we separated the apartment space into three levels of privacy: Guest Hall, living room and private bedrooms. The living room space and the Guest room can be detached and reconnected when necessary. in this way, we tried to make a special dialogue with the social feasibility of the space.
Also, in Iranian culture, we have the concept of KHALVAT which in some way derives from the concept of being alone or withdrawing from the world. so we designed a space behind the living room for giving these meditation times to the users.
The challenge was to make sustainable dialogue and providing light to the interior space. The facade of the project is designed based on energy-saving considerations in the Hot-dry climate of Qom city. It has been worked with traditional local bricks of Qom. These bricks gave a sense of time and age to the building facade. Due to the high demand for interior light by the client and the paradox of transparency, privacy and cultural considerations in the location, half of the window walls became semi-transparent.
In order to revive a historical sense of place in the design. In contextual considerations, we noticed that there was a large garden at the construction site of the project during the Qajar period, which was burnt down due to the expansion of the city 50 years ago. So we want to point out the sense of The Iranian garden to the project. in order to point to this ancient historical context of the project site, we placed small Shams frames on the semi-transparent windows. the frame Shams is a geometrical pattern from the history of Iranian and Islamic art. The form of Shams representing the mythology of nature and garden flowers. So sunlight casts shadows on interior spaces and it reminds of the garden memories of the past trees in the interior spaces. Also, the columnar walls of bricks added to the facade that represents the sense of truncated trunks of trees. This sense of remembrance and identity, along with creating shadows on the facade and thermal comfort in the interior, also caused the climatic function of the facade.
So in this project, we made different contextual dialogues with the social, historical, and environmental sustainability in Qom city.
