Invisible Tehran(s)
Imagine a parallel city in which different layers of reality are blending into a new fictional reality!
I participated in this workshop in the summer of 2016 at the Contemporary Architects Association in Tehran.
Tutors: Rojia Forouhar-Amirhossein Taheri.
We wanted to create another possible Tehran existing in parallel to the real one. We had given each a site in Tehran, which we had to visit and describe through an objective text. There was a Jury session on our texts and after that, we exchanged our texts with each other without letting the other person know about the site’s true location. Each of us started to design a space based on the new text in hand. Finally, we were told about the original location of our projects and the results were so intriguing in terms of re-reading the reality of the city.
I had given a text about the Plasko building in Jomhouri Street, Tehran. The text seemed to have so many clues to a longer story behind the surface. I joined the clues together and added some more details to the original text. When I finished designing my project and I was aware of the location, I went there and took some notes and pictures of the existing Plasko building. I completed my story with all these notes and I tried to make some connections between mine and the real Plasko.
There was a tragic incident a week before our presentation session, Plasko building collapsed and was ruined completely after a fire outburst. This had an enormous influence on me and everyone in my country, so I rewrote my story once more considering this incident.
The story was about a formerly precious building that has been neglected by people in the city as if it was invisible. There is an underground world underneath the building that pulls down the few people who have happened to notice the building, even if it is just for a split second.
They enter a circle of events that keeps repeating forever, they lose their memories at the beginning of each cycle and experience each part of the journey with a fresh look every time they go through this loop. There is a small chance that one person might be able to go through all the layers, obstructions, and distractions on the way to be able to reach the peak of this triangular world and slide out through the giant slide in the end. even then, that person will be recruited by the sweeping organization, the orange floating globe, and will be given a sweeping task to do for the rest of his/her life. So there is no way out of this loop, no apparent exit points. Once you are in you won’t remember anything so you can’t try for anything in particular.
By the time of the fire, all the people of the city were already living in that world instead, stuck in the vicious circle of events. When the building collapsed, everyone was free from that world finally, they were floating in the city’s sky. Eventually, they landed each in a random location and in a random role to play in society. No one remembered who they are or where they have come from, but soon this very incident was all part of the history and was forgotten too.
