established in 2001, arsh design studio has been dedicated to both scholarly research and innovative practice when it comes to all areas related to production of space. our work addresses very complex socio-cultural landscape of iran particularly in the context of city of tehran. our main concern is to re-evaluate mainstream iranian building typologies, pushing the envelope to the extreme when dealing with zoning by laws and the logic of operation that is exacted by real estate market dynamics that have historically limited the level of intervention for iranian architects.

city of tehran among many other iranian cities, is an absurd constructed landscape. urban density is achieved through massive deployment of a mid-rise building type-four to five storey pilottee apartment buildings. thus, the exterior manifestation of the apartment building from a street point of view is limited to a single two-dimensional façade; northern or southern depending on orientation of the lot in relation to the street. furthermore, due to particular dynamics of real estate market, the investors demand architects to design for maximum allowed envelope to be built to maximize the profit return of the investment. under such circumstances, instead of volumetric composition or even planar layout of the project, it is the main façade of the building with the maximum depth of 20 to 40 centimeters that is actually designed. in fact, architects commit themselves to the somewhat strange task of a graphic designer that designs a two-dimensional composition layout at the scale of a four to five storey building.

under such circumstances we have tried to incorporate the following set of design strategies for all our projects that address the above mentioned set of problems: (1) considering the exterior architectural surface or façade as a micro-section that needs to be architecturally developed as opposed to graphically composed, (2) introducing variations in micro and macro-sections of architectural space, applying innovative construction techniques combined with choice of cheap materials.