A new geography of modernity's alternative
places allows for the possible existence of worlds
that are parallel to those most familiar to us where
every design signal is immediately codified.
Encountering a different genre of contemporary
architecture in these places induces a sensation of
fascination and disconcertment. It is like when we
meet people who are normally far removed from
our paths of existence and we are uncertain how
to classify them for our purposes of love, criticism
or mere communication.
So if it is true that (at least according to Freud's
interpretation of dreams) every house represents a
person, usually with autobiographical traits, we
ought to imagine the architect Pouya Khazaeli
Parsa – and probably also his client Tahmineh
Darvish – as citizens of a difficult Middle Eastern
republic torn between East and West,
modernisation and conservation, hawks and
doves, laissez-faire and building programme. In a
context that you sense is disorderly and
haphazard, architect and client have sought to
recreate a housing structure with slender means
and honest design intentions that would, at least
in part, indicate their western modernist vocation
as opposed to the muddle of ideas and forms that
folklore attributes to such places.
Having banned all fake references to Islam, Pouya
Khazaeli Parsa (who also worked with Shigeru Ban
for a while on the studio on the roof of the Centre
Pompidou) focused on a difficult spatial variation
of Le Corbusier's "Poem of the right angle". The
crucial and original design idea stemmed from the
desire to resolve a functional need of disarming
simplicity: to allow those living in the house to
enjoy the mystery of the Caspian Sea (maybe a
sea, maybe a lake) which is blocked from the view
of those in the surreal overdevelopment of the
tourist resort of Daryacheh.
Aided probably by his experience as a sculptor,
Pouya Khazaeli Parsa sent the building soaring
towards the sky and marked it with an aerial ramp.
This element cuts into the closed mass of the
walled box and creates a first-floor terrace that is
open on the outside and ends at the true roof
garden, which offers a charming panorama that
stretches out towards the beach.
Far removed
from the obsession with ribbon constructions that
fills so many S,M,L,XL building competitions, its
physiognomy represents the schizophrenic split of
the contemporary designer – who aspires, on the
one hand, to the order required of every structure
but is, on the other, swept away by expression
requirements into the whorls of thought and the
constructed form.
Corbu in Iran
Architect and client come together on the beaches of the Caspian Sea to build architecture in which the Persian/Islamic culture meets western modernità. Design and photography by Pouya Khazaeli Parsa. Text by Stefano Casciani.
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- Stefano Casciani
- 01 August 2007