Urban shelter

Located along one of Mashhad’s main boulevards, the project emerged as an architectural pause within the density and disorder of the city, seeking to reintroduce calmness, intimacy and balance into a fragmented urban landscape. The residence is conceived not merely as a five-storey building, but as a vertical garden and contemplative retreat. It negotiates movement and stillness, presence and seclusion, urban exposure and domestic introspection. An architecture that breathes with the city while offering refuge from it.

 

Context Integration

Situated at minimal distance from a major boulevard, the project confronts the intensity of traffic, noise and visual clutter that define this urban edge. The surrounding fabric is composed primarily of low-rise, aging houses of limited architectural value; The project was the first contemporary intervention on the street and therefore assumed a dual role: to act as a prototype for future development while remaining a respectful neighbor.

Within this modest green setting, a single Afra tree stood as the only trace of nature in the lane. Opposite the site, views open toward a row of auto-repair workshops and disordered rooftops, conditions that demanded careful mediation rather than confrontation. The project thus positions itself as a composed urban façade toward the boulevard, while cultivating an inward-looking domestic sanctuary for its residents.

 

 

Spatial Organization

The building’s spatial logic is structured around the interplay of light, greenery and privacy. Two primary volumes organize the program: a southern box accommodating private spaces and oriented toward optimal sunlight, and a northern box containing public functions in closer dialogue with the street. A continuous architectural envelope unifies these volumes into a coherent mass, negotiating between exposure and retreat.

As the first structure along the alley, the building establishes its own height datum in relation to pedestrian scale and anticipated neighboring constructions – an act of measured restraint rather than assertion. The presence of the existing Afra tree inspired the creation of a terrace that vertically extends this fragment of greenery across upper levels, enabling residents to cultivate their own planted thresholds over time.

By rotating the northern public volume toward this terrace, the design transforms the outdoor space into a central spatial nucleus rather than a secondary amenity. Anticipating future urban densification, the project avoids dependence on distant views, instead generating internalized qualities through layered sections, filtered light and spatial depth.

 

 

Material Palette

A permeable brick screen wraps the entire building, forming a porous membrane between dwelling and city. Behind it, a narrow green patio runs along the façade, introducing vegetation and diffused daylight into the interior while softening the harsh outlook toward the workshops across the street. This brick layer performs as a climatic and visual filter, moderating light, temperature and privacy, operating less as ornament and more as a responsive skin.

The building’s fluid appearance emerges from a disciplined modular system, lending the mass a subtle dynamism: grounded among its older neighbors, yet gently inclining toward the boulevard as if acknowledging the city’s rhythm. Inside, the layout privileges flexibility and calibrated ambiguity. Rooms adapt to evolving domestic routines; furniture becomes a spatial mediator, and light itself operates as a subtle partition. The kitchen and living areas maintain partial opacity, extending the façade’s conceptual dialogue of “seeing” and “being seen” into the interior realm.