Shahinshahr Women's Park

Before the 1979 revolution, Iranian people, especially women enjoyed more freedoms. However, under the ideology of the new government, even the most private aspects of women's lives, including the right to choose their clothing, were restricted. Women who had experienced a modern and free life during the Pahlavi era could not tolerate these restrictions and fought against them through civil disobedience. One of the most widespread of these protests was the Woman-Life-Freedom movement. In the past 20 years, in response to protests from women, the government was forced to define a space called the Women's Park, which can be likened to the harem of the Islamic government. This park separated women from the fabric of society by a 6-meter wall within which women offered a shell of their plundered freedom. Outside and inside this wall, a dual life took place; outside the wall full of restrictions, and inside the wall with limited and apparent freedom. A few months after the Woman-Life-Freedom movement, a project called the Shahinshahr Women's Park was referred to us. The project program was to design a walled park for women, which contained a myriad of functions including a sports complex and cultural facilities. This project began with a question for us: in the face of power and ideology, what role can an architect play? Should one adopt an active or passive approach? As such, the project emerged to us as a mediator between the present and the future; a tool for imagining the future. This project, in addition to carrying the gene of its current state, also has a part of tomorrow's gene. In this project, we tried to transform the thick 6-meter wall into a border with a dual nature, part of which belongs to the present and part of which is a craving for dreaming the future. In the first step, we tried to change the park program and turn it from a women's park into a public park with a cultural-sports complex with a hybrid nature. In the second step, instead of designing a dense and integrated complex, we organized the spaces in the form of cells around a central courtyard. In this way, we tried to strengthen the formal and functional agency of the cells by increasing their level of contact with the urban space. In the third step, we divided the project program into two general parts: 1. Spaces in which, mixing of men and women was possible according to the ruling ideology. 2. Spaces that could only be used by women. With this tactic, some of the cells could work simultaneously with the outside as well as inside and could play a role in blurring this border and be an imagination of the future; a future in which there is no wall and no restriction to civil freedoms. Empty spaces were considered in some of these cells, and by destroying them in the future, the harem of the Islamic government would be turned into a public space.