Hadi Tehrani is a German architect of Iranian origin, one of the three founding partners of BRT, which today is considered one of the leading design companies in Germany, and also the owner of his own design firm. The main buildings of Hadi Tehrani are located in Germany, and the most iconic objects are located mainly in Hamburg, where the office itself is based in the Deichtor office building he built. However, even in Russia, Hadi Tehrani is not just passing through, but on business: in Moscow for several years there has been a representative office of the bureau - the BRT Rus company, created jointly with the INTECO corporation. Tehrani, although not a world-class star, designs objects of a truly stellar scale. And, probably, this is what at one time attracted the attention of countries with rapidly developing development, preferring, as you know, to build grandiose and expensive. So, in pre-crisis Moscow, INTECO hoped to involve Tehrani in the design of a new ring of high-rise buildings, and the UAE ordered several multifunctional complexes to the architect at once.
The scale of Tehran's objects is expressed not only in the number of square meters, but also in the significance, "loudness" of the architectural statement itself. Each BRT building is an event building, a bright and self-sufficient object that claims to be a new urban landmark and landmark status. Moreover, all of them are really made of glass and due to this they are not fenced off from the outside world, but, on the contrary, actively interact with the environment. Take, for example, the office complex Berliner Bogen - a 36-meter fully glazed arched structure has already become a new symbol of the southeastern part of Hamburg's city center. The motif of the bridge building is reproduced on a larger scale in the competition project of a residential building for Copenhagen - the 130-meter arch above the water includes not only apartments and services, but also a special elevator that allows citizens to move to the other side.
The projects carried out by Tehrani for the UAE can be called new "wonders of the world". For example, the same typology of a house-bridge on the scale of Abu Dhabi grows into a real futuristic palace on numerous pillars. On the upper floors of the Water palace there are apartments, and below them there are shops, as if suspended inside glass stalactites. For the same Abu Dhabi, Tehrani designed a gigantic residential building Oyster, reminiscent of either a modernist round chair or a clam.
However, Hadi Tehrani is convinced that in order to create a spectacular building, it is absolutely not necessary to make it very large. You can, for example, use the technique of a direct metaphor ("corporate identity", as the architect himself calls it) and design a lamp house for a lighting company. This is exactly what Tehrani himself did when he received an order for the headquarters from Tobias Grau, one of Germany's most famous lighting factories. The base of this unusual building is made of concrete, the supporting frame is made of glued wooden structures, and the shell (which plays the role of the “lamp” shade) is made of glass and metal. Built back in 1996, it still looks very modern.
The architect is truly masterful in glass, and in his work he strives to get away "as far as possible from the rough office glass-parallelepipeds." Tehrani built its first object with a point-mounted glass facade - a car showroom - in Hamburg in 1991. And in 1993, in the city of Kiel, the building of the savings bank was completed, in which the foyer with ATMs was interpreted as a glass box suspended on metal cables, and it was after this object that the architect was first talked about as a guru of modern glass architecture.
Finally, another most important quality of Tehran's architecture is their environmental friendliness and compliance of the object with the initial conditions of the site. The architect is deeply convinced that every future construction site already contains an “optimal design”, which only needs to be recognized with the help of intuition and analysis. And Tehrani necessarily brings large-scale landscaping to its projects, developing the motif of the winter garden to large oases, placed not only in courtyards and atriums, but also right on the facades, in specially made recesses for this. The apotheosis of the use of this technique can be considered the office of Swiss Re in Munich. As Tehrani himself described this object: "I put the field vertically and built a building inside." But perhaps the best example of BRT's environmental architecture is the skyscrapers that have become part of the reconstruction project for the old harbor of Cologne. Having won first place in an international competition back in 1992, this project was only recently implemented. Taking the idea of El Lissitzky's horizontal skyscrapers as a basis, Tehrani raised them above old buildings like harbor cranes supported by elevator shafts.
It should be noted that Hadi Tehrani is generally very delicate when working in a historical environment. This, in addition to Cologne, was shown by his reconstruction of a German brewery, as well as one of the Moscow projects - proposals for the reconstruction of the buildings of the Warm Trade Rows on Ilyinka. The architect proposed to build on the buildings with glass "greenhouses", reminiscent of the overlap of shopping arcades, and turn the spaces between the rows into atriums. True, other Moscow projects created in the framework of cooperation with INTECO are distinguished by a much larger scale. Suffice it to recall the pyramid-shaped skyscraper on Profsoyuznaya, which at one time drew sharp criticism from the Moscow mayor, or the business park in the Setun river valley in the form of five "flying saucers". Moreover, at the lecture, a distinct feeling was created that the architect was exporting his own projects 10 years ago to Moscow - the same Setun Hills, for example, is very similar to the 1997 Dortmund Central Transport Station project. However, Tehrani himself is not at all embarrassed by this fact - he is convinced that a talented architect should also be a good businessman.
And really something, but Hadi Tehrani's business activity is not to be occupied. As mentioned, in addition to BRT, he founded a successful design company producing pieces of furniture and even trendy birdhouses. Speaking at the Moscow Architectural Institute, Tehrani admitted that he dreams of taking a worthy place among such architects and designers as Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe and others. But he also has a backup option: in the most extreme case, the singer of glass facades will go down in history as a musician, because in his free time from professional activities, the architect records discs with compositions of his own composition.
