Tejarat Bank New Headquarters (The Deep) | Tehran, Iran | 2022

Architects: [SHIFT] Process Practice
Design Team: Rambod Ilkhani, Nashid Nabian, Dorna Mesrzade, Kajal Kouchakpour, and Naghme Asadbeigi
Associate Architects: Soltanpour Studio
Lead Architect: Amin Soltanpour
General Contractor: Tejarat Construction Managment(TCM)
Client: Tejarat Bank
Photographs: Courtesy of the Architects

By its very definition, the banking industry is a very conservative industry. But, with the ongoing paradigm shift in how the architects conceptualize finance, money, and the exchange of value, can the architects imagine a bank as an entity that is in a symbiotic relationship with the city, open to the general public?

Furthermore, in dealing with an icon, can the new architecture function as a context to an existing text, as opposed to becoming an autonomous text in its own right? For the bank of the 21st century, how can the architects produce an architecture that contributes to the contemporaneity of its agency? Modern banking does not have a long history in Iran. The, Imperial Bank' was the first modern bank in Iran, which was founded in 1889.

The establishment of banking was inspired because the Iranian government had aimed for fundamental reforms in the country to modernize Iran, being much informed by the models that had been adopted in Western countries at the time. The architecture of banks in this initial period of the establishment of modern banking was very much informed by canons of new classicism.

When Mohammad Reza Pahlavi took the reign from his father and became the last king of Iran, he aimed for deeper reforms in terms of faster modernization of the country through rapid industrialization, fueled by unprecedented income that had become possible due to oil export.

Tehran's downtown started to take a new image, with Takht-Jamshid Street, being envisioned as Tehran's Wall Street. In 1966, the construction of the, Industrial Bank of Iran', one of the most modern architectures, ever imagined for the city, started. The building's section represented an urban-scale letter  ‘I’ as a one-letter-long acronym for ‘Industry’. The project was completed after the revolution and was handed over to the Bank of Commerce.

The architecture of this building is very much informed by the tectonics of late-modernism, with lots of glass and steel on the façade. In 2021, a large-scale extension to the existing building was competitioned, and The DEEP(Design-Driven Encapsulated Enterprise 4 People)' was their winning submission to this competition above. The architects decided that with major paradigm shifts in contemporary modes of operation of finance and banking, their proposal needed to be forward-looking with a contemporary architectural language and capacity for dynamism that would allow the complex to adapt to changes of practice with agility and exactitude.
The Bank, with a capital B and as a high-level concept for an institution, needed to become an agile institution, incorporating fundamental shifts such as the substitution of physical services by digital ones and distance-working instead of in-office engagement of the employees, and last, but not least, the introduction of digital currencies in the realm of banking and finance. Under such circumstances, the architects started imagining a 21st-century alternative for the building that will house a 21st-century institution for banking.

The project was envisioned as a collectivity of three towers that are connected together with dynamic bridges that would change the operational structure of the building on-demand and whenever needed due to the dynamic change of the physical program of the building. The triad was then covered with a surface to make it whole, visually and volumetrically. A public concourse with ramps and connections and co-working pods for financial start-ups were added to the building as well. The bank and the public concourse touch but do not interfere with each other's operation.

It is as if one of the most conservative institutions of modern society, meaning the Bank, is lending its surface area to the city and the public realm. Furthermore, the architects needed to address the question of the I-shaped icon. In interacting with an existing Icon, how should the architects have approached the volumetric design of the extension? the architects decided that the extension should formally distance itself from being an exact and recognizable form, functioning instead, as a backdrop of the I-shaped Icon.