The Poet’s House by Next Office is the restoration and adaptive reuse of the former home of Iranian poet and dissident Ahmad Shamlou into a cultural center in downtown Tehran. While preserving the original brick façade and structural shell, the project introduces a spatial intervention along a second-floor wall bearing a handwritten poem by Shamlou. This element was extended into a conceptual and semi-structural backbone—transformed into a three-dimensional promenade that opens the house toward the city. Through this approach, the formerly private courtyard becomes a public open space that invites visitors into the life, thoughts, and legacy of the poet.
The client—a devotee of Shamlou—sought to preserve the poet’s former home and transform it into a public space commemorating his literary and political legacy. Shamlou, a politically engaged poet who was repeatedly imprisoned for his counter-viewpoints, remained a controversial figure even after his death, with his gravestone vandalized multiple times by government supporters. The house itself was a neglected brick building with rounded corners and expressive lintels, characteristic of Tehran’s 1970s architecture. The anticipated program included exhibition areas, a library, bookstore, café, and restaurant, envisioned as a hub for writers and Shamlou’s readers along with an informal urban tour of his life.
The brick load-bearing structure required reinforcement. Rather than concealing this necessity, we turned it into a central architectural-structural feature. A new steel wall was designed along the interior wall inscribed with a handwritten poem by Shamlou to his wife and muse, Aida— a wall that came to be known in the project as the "Aida Wall". This intervention cuts through the building and rises from the courtyard to the rooftop, superimposing itself onto the generic structure to dramatize a constant tension between old and new, echoing the poet’s rebellious spirit and his significance in Iran’s cultural history.
Steel was chosen for its aging quality and formal responsiveness, capable of being cut, jagged, rusty surface, or bent. The project was designed so that the new steel structure could one day be removed, leaving the original intact. In doing so, it challenges and transforms, without erasing, the memory it honors.
