Tehran, Iran
Combining aesthetic innovation, sustainability, and functionality, [SHIFT] Process Practice and Soltanpour Studio under the lead of Amin Soltanpour create an office development for the Tejarat Bank to be used as the bank’s new headquarters also know as “The Deep”.
Tejarat Bank New Headquarters stems from its concept of a building that offers both depth in spatial experience and verticality in its form.
The architectural team has aimed to break away from the standard office tower design by offering an unconventional massing that transforms the relationship between the building’s interior spaces and the city.
For its functional and aesthetic design, the DEEP has been awarded a 2024 International Architecture Awards by The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design and The European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies.
The architecture of this building is very much informed by the tectonics of late-modernism, with lots of glass and steel on the façade.
In 2021, a large-scale extension to the existing building was competitioned, and The DEEP(Design-Driven Encapsulated Enterprise 4 People) was their winning submission to this competition above.
The architects decided that with major paradigm shifts in contemporary modes of operation of finance and banking, their proposal needed to be forward-looking with a contemporary architectural language and capacity for dynamism that would allow the complex to adapt to changes of practice with agility and exactitude.
The Bank, with a capital B and as a high-level concept for an institution, needed to become an agile institution, incorporating fundamental shifts such as the substitution of physical services by digital ones and distance-working instead of in-office engagement of the employees, and last, but not least, the introduction of digital currencies in the realm of banking and finance.
Under such circumstances, the architects started imagining a 21st-century alternative for the building that will house a 21st-century institution for banking.
The project was envisioned as a collectivity of three towers that are connected together with dynamic bridges that would change the operational structure of the building on-demand and whenever needed due to the dynamic change of the physical program of the building.
The triad was then covered with a surface to make it whole, visually and volumetrically.
A public concourse with ramps and connections and co-working pods for financial start-ups were added to the building as well.
The bank and the public concourse touch but do not interfere with each other’s operation.
It is as if one of the most conservative institutions of modern society, meaning the Bank, is lending its surface area to the city and the public realm.
Furthermore, the architects needed to address the question of the I-shaped icon. In interacting with an existing Icon, how should the architects have approached the volumetric design of the extension?
The architects decided that the extension should formally distance itself from being an exact and recognizable form, functioning instead, as a backdrop of the I-shaped Icon.
Project: Tejarat Bank New Headquarters “The Deep”
Architects: [SHIFT] Process Practice
Design Team: Rambod Ilkhani, Nashid Nabian, Dorna Mesrzade, Kajal Kouchakpour, and Naghme Asadbeigi
Associate Architects: Soltanpour Studio
Lead Architect: Amin Soltanpour
General Contractor: Tejarat Construction Managment(TCM)
Client: Tejarat Bank
Photographs: Courtesy of the Architects
