Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults

(under construction)

This institute began as an organization devoted to creating children’s libraries throughout the country. It later expanded to a publishing house, and made audio-visual materials, and animated and short films for children. It had recently embarked on a cultural program of establishing music, theater and art workshops for children in conjunction with the libraries. The institute also hosted the annual International Children’s Film Festival in Tehran.

The program called for offices, auditorium, cafeteria, reference library, studios for audio-visual and films, and underground parking. The site was a hill facing the road in a new town west of Tehran. It was situated next to a residential area of single-family houses; therefore, we tried to avoid an oppressive, huge building by breaking the program into parts.

We cut the hill and designed our structure to conform to the contour of the hill, starting the units low and gradually increasing the height. An outdoor, streetlike space was conceived with access to all the units which faced this space. Wheat color brick is used throughout, except for the staircases which are in transparent glass and generous in space. Separation of each brick box (unit) by a glass tower further diminishes the scale down to the residential units.