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Architects: Mohammad Kanisavaran
- Area: 270 m²
- Year: 2020
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Photographs:Mohammad Hassan Ettefagh
Text description provided by the architects. The 1330 House in the Kurdish city of Mahabad started from a 70 years old house and has an area of approximately 270 square meters. This house had a residential use before and has a different history in its background. Part of the old building was built 70 years ago, but during the reconstruction process, clues have been found that show the adobe bricks in some walls date back to more than 100 years. Over the past seven decades, due to changing lifestyles, owners have removed or added some parts of the building to meet their needs.
The new use of the house has come alive with the support and investment of the private sector, led by a woman to preserve the building and create a new space to spread the culture and art of Kurdistan. The strength of the project was the creative division of spaces and the definition of uses in the design process so that the spaces can have a new and different definition from their past. For example, Zhirkhan, which was used as a residential area in the past and in the winter, had changed to a warehouse over time and has been revived as the main space of the gallery by increasing its height now. All elements that have been removed from the building (such as warehouses) or added (such as canopies and stairs) have been used solely to facilitate the optimal use of space or to respond to climatic conditions and to control and direct rainfall.
Uses had to be diverse and heterogeneous to create a combination of diverse functions and meet the needs of the area today, so the complex was divided into a café and a cultural/artistic section that work in conjunction with each other. Crossing a 13-meter-long corridor, we reach the central courtyard of the house, which acts as a flexible and serviceable central core and gathers a combination of fixed and variable spaces such as music and collective living space around it and leads the audience from the central core to Zhirkhan, the gallery spaces, and finally the entrance of the cafe and a small cinema room, respectively.
The cultural-artistic part of this house is the core of new collective experiences. Entering the 1330 house, the music scene is adjacent to the central courtyard and is a cozy place for listening to Kurdish music, which has been formed to support the Kurdish women singers or musicians. For young people who have been deprived of having a cinema in their city for 20 years, there is a small space called a small cinema room to show movies next to the café. Due to the lack of art gallery spaces in this city, the four main halls of this house are dedicated to supporting artists in displaying or selling their works and providing special support to women and socially disadvantaged groups, such as women prisoners.
Finally, the restaurant cafe makes it possible to taste the unique taste of Kurdish food cooked with local vegetables, with female staff who want to be a role models for other young girls in the area, despite the restrictions and the traditional view of working in the café. There is also a small library in the café to share books related to art and literature. The roof of this house is a symbol of the modern spirit and the modern use of this complex in the traditional body of the building, which will be used for holding events in the future. The shape of the roof entrances is inspired by the architectural literature of the region, which is reminiscent of the stepped architecture of the Horaman region.
1330 House project tries to propose a construction method that achieves the following goals: 1- Cheap construction and use of local materials that are economically beneficial to the employer in a way that the building material pallet pays homage to the old building and reduces transportation costs 2- Use of a material (cement plaster) with three special techniques to control costs and create visual beauty and no need to executive expert for each method 3- Preserving and strengthening the previous layers and adding a new layer 4 - Reconstruction and reuse of old buildings instead of destroying them. In other words, we tried to listen more instead of talking. Listen to the needs of the customer and its community, as well as what the building says about its bed. In doing so, we sought to identify additional structures as an important historical layer and as a vital embodiment of Mahabad's often-overlooked contemporary civic life.
Why this project is valuable? Mahabad is a city where temporarily forgotten art shops (such as calligraphy education) are seen there and "Hazhar" is a holy name among culture and art lovers. The design team tried to create a new style that is rooted in the history, culture, and art of the city. Mahabad, which has seen fewer inhabitants migrate to larger cities due to cultural and economic reasons compared to its neighboring cities and has a large number of literate people and artists needs more cultural and artistic spaces with the growth of the young generation. Running a "cafe" by a woman is a form of breaking tradition in this city. This space is called 1330 house.
Our client's priority was the freedom and security of women in a traditional society because the cafes in this city are a male space and women are only a small part of this society and there is no special place for cultural or artistic activities for women. She wanted to offer a new place for women to experience a new lifestyle and enjoy a new sense of experience in the cultural space. Of course, the presence of women in cultural and artistic spaces can probably be considered feedback from their presence in the social arena. We attribute the success of the project, despite its limited financial resources, to the creation of an atmosphere that, as users say, has become a promising place in the city and they are proud to have it in their city. A place for daily meetings as well as a rare place in the city to create a new community that combines the young and old generations, in other words, revitalization based on communication.
