Delirious Tehran: Vertical Abysses of a Den[se-]City, By Sara Khorshidifard, Published in il quaderno
Abstract
Void mechanisms made by, with or within architectures retain essential aptitudes for spurring embryonic on-site capacities. This article examines urban voids possibilities, focusing on their resourceful and ecstatic capacities as social constructs in the imbued context of the capital city, Tehran. Conceiving of big vertical crevasses as one possible genre, the voids are perceived and weighed in contrast with the dense city, projecting transcendent permeations into the urban atmosphere. Beside the hefty and vertical, other typological possibilities subsist such as those insinuating, slim spatial recesses under the building skins of urban streets or outdoor rooms as homey urban alcoves. Locations range, from the fully determined, sketched out or centralized, forcing to bridge social interaction, to the merely accrued over time within unintended or fragmented residual spaces. Nonetheless, in a lump sum, voids of Tehran compose opportunistic terrains in the contemporary city for emergent on-site creations. Centering on an aura filled not with emptiness but richness, the article details their general delineations and specific understandings in the city, focusing on how few of architecturally-bred void mechanisms have remained essential and idyllic as the epitomes for on-site situational happenings.
