This year’s ICONIC AWARDS in the discipline Innovative Architecture were presented by the German Design Council on Monday at the Pinakothek der Moderne museum of modern art in Munich. We are pleased to announce that Hadi Teherani Architects was able to be on hand to accept an award for Flair of Frankfurt, and Hadi Teherani Design prizes for Range 270, a door handle, and the Open Frameworks collection. The distinction “Best of Best” was given to the Open Frameworks collection. The ICONIC AWARDS are regarded as an unbiased seal of approval for achievement in contemporary design and architecture. We thank the jury for its selection and our clients at STRABAG Real Estate/RFR, HEWI and PARADOR for the outstanding efforts working in co-operation.

Photographer: Manuel Debus (top), Lutz Sternstein (below)

The building is supposed to become a landmark and new entryway between the central railway station and inner city while generally acting as a signal for a new dawning in Duisburg. Last week, at the 2nd of October, Mercator One celebrated its topping-out ceremony. Mayor Sören Link and investor Torsten Toeller joined the festivities. “The city did this extremely intelligently,” says Toeller, by not selling the property to the highest bidder and instead stipulating a price and deciding in favour of the best draft. And following a unanimous decision by the jury, that draft was submitted by Torsten Toeller, or rather by his architect, Hadi Teherani. Hadi Teherani Architects has designed a six-storey building with glassed-in frontages and fanned-out corners for the storeys at this prominent site near Hauptbahnhof, the central railway station. The aluminium cladding forms a second design-constituting element. All of the windowframes had been re-installed here at some point. In other words: solely recycled aluminium has been used. Thomas Steiger from the firm Wicona based in Ulm brought along a certificate attesting to the fact that over 100 tonnes of CO₂ had been saved in the process.

A couple of days ago Panoptikon had the honour to accept the award for the best commissioned image for a visualisation realised with Hadi Teherani Architects, in the ARCHITECTURAL IMAGE Award at the CGARCHITECT 2019 ARCHITECTURAL 3D AWARDS, hosted by the D2 Conferences in Vienna. The office- and commercial project including a shopping mall is somewhere in Vanak, Tehran. “We believe it is essential that the strongest attribute of each design becomes the spine of the visual story we eventually decide to tell. For this piece we thought of the void of the vertical atrium as the generator of a mysterious pulling force around which all temptations would unfold. The void becomes a physical body and the main actor in this scene.” Tudor Vasiliu

The 2nd HAMBURGER IMMOBILIENKONGRESS (“HAMBURG REAL ESTATE CONVENTION”) revolved around the issue of whether the future is a black box. It included discussions about unidentified potentials, political parameters, a logistics tunnel beneath the inner city and innovative office buildings. Roughly 300 guests listened to the opinion presented by star architect Hadi Teherani: “In Germany, everything is deliberated and thought about. Although things do move ahead, everything ends up being co-ordinated in advance.” In Asia, construction projects are realised in a quarter of the time. “The visions one has can be played out better abroad. In light of the cramped conditional frameworks, that’s just not the case here.” Alongside uniform standards, a clear-cut yes to digitalisation and political reliability, there wasn’t even a whiff of doubt on any of the panels dealing with the different asset classes: Hamburg is one of the top cities in Germany. Or, as Hadi Teherani put it: “You can hardly do anything wrong here because everything has been laid out so nicely. Nonetheless the city has to change. But it takes courage to do that.”

Photographer: Tom Dachs