Sam Pasdaran in Tehran, Iran by Razan Architects

At the end of the 1990’s, the face of Tehran and the lifestyle of middle-class changed with the establishment of shopping centers and malls. The new shopping centers had advantages such as the creating interactions between people and the city, but they led to local dilemmas with the increase of traffic and urban problems.

The big challenge of Sam Pasdaran design was to construct a commercial project on a narrow street. In this project, in addition to encouraging the citizens to interact with the city as well as observing the client’s demands such as maximizing commercial area, the problems including traffic, overcrowding, and the degradation in quality of life should be prevented.

?Architects: Razan Architects

?Project: Sam Pasdaran

?Location: Tehran, Iran

?Photography: Deed Studio

?Lead Architects: Navid Emami

?Project Manager: Saeid Souri

?Design Team: Arash Rezayizadegan, Sima Rahimian, Fatemeh Rostami, Minoo Pour Rahmat, Hamed Ahmadi, Behrouz Samadi, Parisa Hamidi, Yasamin Yaraghi

?Interior Design Team: Shaghayegh Daneshmand, Golafrouz Alanour,Nastaran Lajevardi

?Construction: Mohammad Ghaemi,Reza Motazedi

?Structure: Vahid Ghara Khani(Bastan Pol Consulting Engineers)

?Gross Built Area (square meters or square foot): 15000 m2

?Completion Year: 2018

Our strategy was to remove the shops and brands by changing the project programming from a commercial building to a unique Mega Store. In the new strategy, in addition to having local functions like gym, café, and hypermarket, the Mega store interacted with the city in its original function. However, its customers only come to this store to buy special goods.

In the first step, we divided the project into two parts by drawing an imaginary line and different actions against the environment were considered for them. The lower part of this imaginary line was for the local interaction and the upper part generally displayed the project’s interaction with the city.