Shopping Palace | Teheran

The fun palace

It will probably look like nothing on earth from the outside: the services ower, lifting gantries and building components exists solely  to produce the kind of interior environments that are fitting  and necessary to whatever is going on.

(Reyner Banham on Cedric Price's Fun Palace)

The intervention intends to develop a model of co-living, commerce-housing-working, where different typologies are combined to the public space to create a place generating a different life style. Architecture turns into the tool supporting and responding to all the uncertain conditions related to the system of relationships among different users. The definition of the model takes place outside the contingent urban issues and comes from the integration between public and private space. Within the Teheran Fun Palace different commerce typologies, different way to work and to live are overlapping to respond to the richness of cultural and anthropological features typical of the Iranian culture. This project wants to define a strategy of intervention on the city aiming to define a public space that could represent the complexity of the ongoing social and cultural transformations, experimenting new project approaches and mental components looking more to the time of history as a reference and not to the short periodof the real estate market. The project is conceived as a priori and the city is shaped according to it. As Andrea Branzi claims is necessary to produce less anthropocentric metropolis but more open to a universal hospitality concept. A space for working, shopping and living where the reduction of energetic consumption it is not only a technological issue but corresponds to a wider cultural, spiritual, physical and metaphysical project. The project is characterized by two main elements, a wide glazed space where a tree-shaped architecture constitutes the project structure; the interior spaces are not organized according to traditional architectural devices but are developed around a vertical central nucleus containing all the residential functions, the operative spaces for offices and shops setting the horizontal spaces free to be colonized by a not defined program. At the first three levels the Market, the place of exchange and confrontation where different way of consumptions take place. Housing, work and sport colonize the other levels of the macro livable tree in always different ways creating a certain complexity typical of urban conditions and a total freedom of use.

SHOPPING: the building is a big exchange piazza where on different levels are organized different ways to sell the products; from the bazaar to the boutique, from mono-brand to mono-price, from souk to internet based commerce. The different store typologies are connected through the users and contribute to define an idea of city where it is the use to define the planning.

WORKING: work, as commerce, is based on the comparison of different size spaces;  traditional offices, open space, daily use micro offices, cubicles.

LIVING: the living aspect, as the working, is organized according a dimensional scheme arranged on the dimensional variation connected to the time of usage of the space, from the apartment to a one room for short stay/

SPORT: on the last floor sport as the place to confront and compenetration among different typologies, receiving the different users of the building and establishing different level of relationship among them.