Architecture with low budget

By: Faezeh Ensafi

In my country architecture is a luxurious fantasy, but in much country which architecture is a reality. This building is located in one of the poorest districts of Tehran in Jeyhoon area, where let alone the architecture, you can hardly find a building that has the minimum standard requirements of a sane building. The architect’s consideration in this project was the social role of architecture and this project was a challenge for him. He knew he didn’t have any chance to earn money on this project, but he was determined to show that architecture can happen even in such economically and culturally poor area. There you can hardly make something that is not a square box. The only think you have to work on it as architect, is the plain façade of the building.

The decision for designing this project was to create a method that does not need any phase 2 drawings. The result was paying more attention to details and designing complicated details in a very simple way.

The space requirements were also similar to any small scale modern apartment building. In Iran, labor wage is proportionally low and the possibility of creating special designs on smaller scales is more than developed countries. In this project, the architect tried to be creative on using local labors and show how valuable a brick facade could be and the concentration of the architect was on the exterior of the building, Interior design remained nothing more than a functional space aesthetically related to the façade. In order to recall the traditional architecture, brick was used as the main construction material and made a kind of contemporary mashrabiya to cover the whole façade and to mitigate the glaring sun light of Tehran.

The architects designed a tridimensional brick wall which also has a cultural value. In respect of the low budget, they needed to create a method which does not make them produce lots of executive drawings and does not require a great amount of time for supervision. So they invented a new and extremely easy mean of communication based on a table including all needed information for creating the facade. This is something similar to the instructions traditionally recited in the carpet workshops during the work time to coordinate the activities of several weavers working on the same carpet. This method is like putting together pieces of a simple puzzle, each has a code to identify the location and orientation.