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Sharifi-ha House : Intelligent Architecture

Posted by
on October 11, 2014 at 01:08 PM

Responding to the climatic factors and with user comfort in mind, Sharifi-Ha house is an innovative experiment; where the usually static facade has been replaced by an adaptable, modular living space, and the interior becomes as important as the exterior. This is a concept in intelligent design; what makes it extraordinary is how its outer rooms can rotate, to make it adaptable to the seasons. The project by Tehran-based architetcure firm Next Office has been shortlisted in the house category at the 2014 World Architecture Festival Awards. 

© Courtesy of Internet Sources

After decades of design and urban development, we might finally have struck gold and found the answer that can quite possibly change everything, at least in the field of climate-responsive homes. Frankly speaking, it looks like we might have found the future of housing - and that future is in Iran, where architects have designed an incredible seven-storey home with moveable rooms. Tehran-based architectural studio Next Office are the brains behind the Sharifi-ha House, which features motorized rooms that pivot up to 90 degrees to face entirely in or out at the push of a button, depending on the occupants’ mood or the weather.

The Sharifi-Ha house is already pretty impressive - it features a gym and a swimming pool, but what makes it extraordinary is how its outer rooms can rotate, creating space and also making it adaptable to the seasons. But that’s not the beauty of it. As described above, in just a touch of a button, three of the outer rooms -  the breakfast room, the guest room and the office - can rotate out to overhand the street, letting light in and creating terrace space. Each of the three rooms, which resemble wooden boxes from the outside, is on its own rotating base.

During the cold winters they can close up, keeping the house warm, while during the hot summer months, opening them will ventilate the house. In the "open" mode, the three blocks pivot outwards on their rotating base, pointing the windowed ends to the sun, which also creates a terrace on each floor."Closed" mode hides the windows to keep the house warm during Tehran's snowy winters.

The house has two basement floors, which house the gym and other leisure facilities such as a billiards table, the ground floor has room for parking and the housekeeper's living area, the first and second floors are the main living space, with the kitchen, living room and even piano area, while the top two floors have the bedrooms and bathrooms, as well as another kitchen and more living space.

The turning of the rooms has been a great challenge for the architects. They puzzled over the interior handrails - eventually redesigning them to fold as the rooms rotated. The turning mechanism for the rooms was simple to handle. The mechanical bases were already in use elsewhere; as rotating sets in theaters or platforms for cars in showrooms. The  mechanism also helps inspire the functionality of the house, and how it reacts to the user. For instance, depending on whether there is a guest or not, the guest room - on the second floor - can be reconfigured for different purposes. Similarly home offices and breakfast rooms can change the formality of their appearance according to their residents' desires.

The house is inspired by the traditional Iranian home, which has both a summer and winter living room to reflect the stark difference in the seasons' temperatures. Temperatures in Iran can rise above 40 degrees Celsius or plummet well below freezing. Traditional houses cope with these extremes by incorporating an airy living room for summer and a separate, cozy living room for winter months, but this gets impractical, uneconomical and wasteful.  The rotating rooms negate all of these points, and improve the practicality of the house.

The Sharifi-Ha house has been shortlisted in the house category at the 2014 World Architecture Festival Awards, alongside other impressive entries from the likes of Australia and Malaysia-  because of its concept where a normally static facade has been replaced by an adaptable, modular living space, and the interior becomes as important as the exterior. This is the next step of intelligent design, designs which react to the needs of the people, and adapt to them instead of vice versa. And over at TFOD, we all know that this is precisely what is important for the sake of the future of design.

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