(“Text as taken from the website”)
Mohamadreza Ghodousi
Practice Ideology
ZAV became an official architectural office in 2006. One main characteristic of ZAV is that collaborations with architects and experts outside the office are frequent. With time, these collaborations became increasingly diverse and interdisciplinary, and after Parsa Ardam, the founding partner, left the group two new associates joined: Golnaz Bahrami and Fati Rezaei. In collaboration with other architects and researchers such as Soroush Majidi, Sara Jafari, Sheila Ehsaei, Fereshteh Assadzadeh and many others, ZAV believes that collective creativity can reach grounds unattainable to individual efforts.
ZAV has a research-driven and pragmatic approach towards architecture that tries to explore realistic and practical subjects. The design product is not the starting point of ZAV’s work. Work starts with investigating capacities that enable social and economic agency and even whatever can make small wishes come true, and use architectural means for this end. Spatial scenario and program, spatial organization, architectural typologies, craftsmanship and construction techniques, can all become subject to research in order to find out how their capacities can be activated. In following a social and economic agenda, it is important that architectural qualities are not set aside and neglected, but that instead they become the means of realization of these goals with their inner capacities and tools. And this is some sort of compromise between different and sometimes diverging interests that redefine the question of what architecture is about, and reveal its mediating attributes.
