Tehran World Trade Center

Project Outline

This project emerged from an international competition held in 2017 to design a 72-story commercial and office tower, comprising 61 floors above ground and 11 basement levels.

Conceived in the context of the JCPOA agreement—the nuclear deal between Iran and the P5+1—the building was envisioned as a symbolic architectural statement: a space for the reentry of international companies into Tehran after decades of political and economic isolation. The site was a 50,000-square-meter plot located at a major urban intersection, where the Kordestan and Hakim highways meet, directly facing the ASP Towers. The scale and prominence of the site raised a fundamental question: how could a tower of this magnitude—the tallest in Tehran—simultaneously embody global reconnection while remaining rooted in the city’s historical and urban identity?

Architectural Concept

The project began with the Persian garden as its generative model. Given the expansive footprint of the site, the tower was conceived as emerging from within a garden, which would serve as both podium and spatial origin. In this approach, landscape was not treated as a residual element, but as the organizing framework from which the building’s geometry was derived. The Persian garden’s dual-axis system—east–west and north–south—formed the basis of the tower’s formal logic.

The east–west axis, aligned with Tehran’s most favorable climatic orientation and primary views, was extruded vertically to the full height of the tower. This vertical extrusion was then rotated and reconnected to the north–south axis at ground level, generating a dynamic relationship between vertical form and horizontal landscape. From this operation, two twisted surfaces emerged, diverging at the base and gradually converging upward. These surfaces were thickened to define the tower’s primary mass.

A diagonal cut was then introduced on one façade, breaking the rigidity of the rectangular volume and establishing a visual dialogue with the sloping silhouette of the Alborz mountain range to the north.

The Persian garden was preserved at the podium level, flowing between the tower’s structural legs and maintaining continuity between landscape and architecture. Once the geometry was established, the building’s program was integrated into this formal framework. A vertical solar chimney system was introduced as a passive environmental strategy, channeling airflow through the height of the tower—drawing cooler air from below and exhausting warm air above. This system significantly reduced energy demand by enhancing natural cooling in summer and thermal efficiency in winter.

Passive Design System

In the design of the Tehran WTC, a hollow space has been incorporated inside the tower, perpendicular to the garden axis, to implement the concept of a solar chimney.

A solar chimney is a mechanism that allows benefiting from the natural airflow during hot and cold seasons. So by creating a vertical void in the upper floors of the tower and implementing controllable hatches, the air will flow naturally through the tower, which will save a significant amount of energy. During the summer, the air inside the solar chimney is heated by sunlight and moves upwards. Opening the hatches on the roof allows the warm air to exit, which in turn pulls fresh air from the bottom of each floor into the internal spaces and cools down the building.

In winter, shutting the hatches traps the air and prevents heat loss. This mechanism increases the Passive Mode from 11% – as is the typical rate for conventional buildings – to double that rate, achieving a highly-efficient 22%.

Additionally, the north-south orientation of the tower’s body as well as its rotation enables maximum use of natural lighting for the spaces, while the middle atrium provides light for the internal spaces of the building. Given the changing center of gravity in our plans for different levels and the core systems being off-center, we implemented a system of shear walls and moment frames, in addition to a belt truss system and a braced tube system to control the torsional irregularity of the building as we were in the design stage.

Facade Design

To benefit from the beautiful view of the natural surroundings, Sun Energy glass was chosen as the material to be used for the main façade of the project, which consists of multi-layered glass with a light-sensitive film layer in between, which can adapt to the intensity of the sunlight. In order to further control the intensity of sunlight on the glass, vertical mullions that are 50 cm wide are placed corresponding to the grid of the glass sheets. Consequently, during the hot seasons of the year, especially in the afternoons when the sun shines at an oblique angle, mullions act as vertical canopies and prevent the sunlight from entering directly through the glass. Also for natural ventilation, dampers (or UBrackets) will be installed close to the lower frames of the windows, and horizontal louvers will be set up close to the ceiling to cast shadows on interior spaces during summer as well as to bounce light off the office ceilings helping the farthest and the least bright parts of the space to be lit.

Public Open Space

To provide a space to enjoy fresh air during coffee breaks, a number of public balconies have been designed at different levels. Public spaces will not only exist at ground level. They will be found at varying levels of the mid and top sections, serving as the main connectors of the volumes of the tower while generating a pleasant and uniquely creative working space. The purpose of this project is not merely to create another object but to offer an urban concept and a tower design that continues from and merges with its public spaces.