Bahar Residential Complex
Academic Project | Participated Individually | My Work: Research and Design | 2017
Project Explanation
“Bahar” is a project related to apartment complexes design, located inside the Baharestan zone, adjacent to Esfahan city. This area has been designed for people who need an affordable house or have less potential to buy a big house inside the city. The existing plan is to recreate a residential complex. As a result, the location of the designing site was a big challenge because students could not have the opportunity to design efficiently and comfortably in a vast area. The primary and new challenges that could be a limitation simultaneously were forced to rebuild the residential complex considering its pros and cons and designing a new and more comfortable building complex covering almost all the flaws and meeting all of the inhabitants’ requirements.
Therefore, functional and fundamental studying about the residential complex has been done; then, advantages and disadvantages were recognized; after that, the design process began, considering all the shortages and strength points.
This residential complex should have been designed in 40 units for all ages. Due to residents’ financial ability using elevators was forbidden.
Introduction
Recreating spaces is somehow tied to the past and the future. When recreating a space, the architect recreates and redefines new concepts with all-around attention. Spaces can have the same characters with different definitions depending on the user. Recreating a space is creating a new definition for an existing character. So in this way, the architect can freely make a new and better decision about the previous design, which may be more in the design interest.
The design is about issues such as:
1. Improve the building mass and add more green space to the complex.
2. Improve the space for pedestrians and riders and separate them meaningfully
3. Create a suitable space and neighborhood (an essential factor in designing Iranian houses)
4. Create covered parking lots and parking lots for residents
5. Add yard to houses on every unit
6. Modify lack of proper lighting of northern units
ONE HOUSE
ONE TREE
The next step was to create better granulation of the blocks due to the lack of privacy for each unit in the previous situation:
1. Place the blocks at a greater distance from one another to eliminate any interference.
2. Add a tree to modify the interaction between residents of the units. Moreover, it creates a separation of the districts that helps to have better privacy for the units.
3. Define a more appropriate neighborhood for every three units and then for every district.
Design Process
The current design was created by combining all the small ideas in the previous situation. In the first stage, the arrangement of the blocks is in the same arrangement and direction as before. Five rows of blocks with a distance of 11.5 meters were placed together. For allocating more green spaces between the buildings, one of the rows was eliminated.
- 1.Due to the unfavorable northern daylight, the northern units that were defined in the previous plan were removed
- 2. All the units were located entirely in the south, which is the best lighting for residential in Esfahan city
- This relocating was due to paying attention to energy issues and creating higher thermal comfort for the units. In addition, maintaining Sabats can help the northern side of the building to have a better view and lighting to the south and simultaneously make the area below more intimate and suitable for pedestrians. Moreover, Sabats would provide shadows on hot days in this region.
In the current situation, parking lots and walkways were somehow connected, but the previous situation was dedicated more to riding routes. Also, unlike the previous design, where the access to the parking lots was through the blocks’ inner side, the accessibility switched to the outer side in the current design. This change helped the pedestrian traffic be removed entirely from the residential spaces and provided space for parking cars under the buildings allocated to visitor parking.
Email: maryam.jahadakbar@gmail.com