Golden A' Design Award Winner 2021
Soheil Afshar Mohammadian's Bridge House Private Residential operates as a rich symbolic composition encoding meanings through material, form, spatial relationship, and environmental positioning that speak to fundamental human desires for shelter, prospect, and connection with natural forces. The elevated position of the dwelling above the terrain engages with archetypal associations of the elevated threshold, the raised platform that has signified safety, status, and spiritual aspiration across cultures, while the cantilever extending into space suggests leap, trust, and the reaching toward possibility that characterizes human ambition. The crystalline white volume carries traditional associations of purity, clarity, and transcendence, its angular faceted form evoking mineral geometry and suggesting permanence amid the organic mutability of the surrounding landscape, while warm timber elements wrapped in rhythmic louvers speak to craft tradition, natural material warmth, and the humanizing presence of wood that connects architectural shelter to forest origin. The bridge extending toward the horizon functions as a powerful archetypal element suggesting journey, transition, and the threshold between realms, the solitary figure upon it evoking the contemplative individual positioned between earth and sky, shelter and exposure, the domestic and the infinite. The dramatic cloudscape above encodes traditional symbolism of divine presence, atmospheric drama as sublime encounter, and the temporal passage of weather and light that reminds inhabitants of their participation in natural cycles larger than human timescales. The structural expression of dark steel columns and braces, rather than being hidden, celebrates the supporting framework and may suggest honesty, transparency about the means by which elevated aspirations are achieved and maintained. The color temperature dialogue between warm and cool elements maps onto fundamental symbolic oppositions, hearth and horizon, intimacy and distance, human warmth and cosmic coolness, while the green hillside flowing beneath the elevated structure speaks to fertility, growth, and the landscape as living substrate upon which human dwelling rests as temporary guest rather than permanent conqueror.
In this project, a new and modern context-based architecture is defined with inspiration from local architectural techniques and combining it with modern construction technologies. Furthermore, the design concept is based on the priority of the natural landscape over the constructed project. The design was developed by lower interfering in nature. Therefore, the building is moved away from the earth, which causes the most connection with its landscape consequently. Liner and loop-shaped structures of bridges are grown on different axes, allowing them to have different landscape views.