Ojan Hostel

This project is about of transformation an old abandoned school building to a meditation center in Limakesh, where is one of the beautiful rural areas in northern part of Iran in adjacency to Ramsar City. This new building is going to host sportspersons and yogis due to the existence of Motocross tracks, hiking and climbing tracks and pure nature for meditation and relaxing.
The plot is a 1342 square meter land locate at a hillside forest with an outstanding view to the Ramsar city and nearby villages. A 50 years old existing school building stands on this plot, which is a reminder of contemporary training history of this area. This school is a one-story building with sloped roof and structural cement walls. For saving traces of this rich history, we kept the building and the natural landscape of the land and revised the interior plan to provide all the necessary function for the new program. Therefore, we place interaction spaces, restaurant, reception and bedrooms in the existing building and an extension was added to accommodate supporting facilities on the ground floor and an outdoor platform, bar and office on its rooftop. For the existing building façade, we used some touches of domestic architecture such as wooden louvers and native mix plasters and for the extension we chose rough concrete panels as a symbol of modern architecture to signify the contradiction between old and new. For integration between environment atmosphere and the building’s interior, we decided to choose vernacular design theme.
Moreover, due to the damages happened to the building during these many years mostly caused by landslide, fortifying the structure was necessary. Two different methods was proposed; first one was to add retaining walls on the lower part of the slope and the second suggestion was using piles on the foundation and micro piles in the walls to stich the building to the ground.

Site area: 1342 m
Building area: 530 m
Location: Ramsar, Mazandaran, Iran
Number of floors: 2
Project function: Hostel
Structural System: concrete structure for extension building/ wood and concrete for existing building and micro pile for soil stabilization