Sarv is an office building in Tehran designed by Tamouz Architecture & Construction Group, a studio that both designs and builds. When the team was first called in, in June 2017, the request looked small: approve the façade of a building whose structure was already partly up. The site turned it into a much bigger question. The building covers its whole plot, so the only side that can bring in light and air is the south façade, and that one side had to do almost everything.
A façade with depth
A flat glass front would have solved the light, but not the rest. Facing south, it would have let in too much direct sun, and it would have put the offices on display to the street. The architects decided that the façade needed thickness: not a thin skin, but a space of its own between the building and the city.
The result is made of two layers. The inner one is a line of large windows that bring daylight deep into the floors. The outer one is a semi-transparent screen of vertical wooden railings and steel planters. It filters the sun and the air, and it works like a veil: from inside you can see the street, from the street you can barely see in.
The space in between
The gap between the two layers is not a technical cavity. It is a strip you can walk along, half open, with plants and shade, where the offices step outside. It also softens the edge between a closed building and a busy street, so the boundary becomes a place you can actually use.
Up to the roof
The same idea continues on the roof. Wooden slats and frames shape an open terrace with greenery and views over the city: light and air, but still a certain sense of seclusion.
Inside
Inside, service areas, common spaces and technical systems are arranged with the same logic of layers and controlled openness, so the building reads as one coherent piece from the street to the desks.
The architects describe the project through pairs of opposites: order and disorder, open and closed, seen and unseen, shade and light. Sarv does not choose one side over the other. Its façade sits right in between, and that is what makes an office building squeezed onto a crowded plot feel open towards the street.
Keep reading: a new office building in Carbonera by Carlana Mezzalira Pentimalli and a house in Tehran that rotates its rooms, by Nextoffice.
