City Theater of Qazvin by GRI co. (Golden Rectangle Idea Consulting Engineers)

The City Theater of Qazvin stands as a long-awaited cultural landmark, offering the city its first professional theater space in decades. Conceived as both a performance venue and a social hub, the building provides a much-needed home for Qazvin’s vibrant theater community while simultaneously transforming an underutilized urban site into a dynamic public space. The project, envisioned by the Qazvin Municipality in 2018 and realized under significant time and spatial constraints, exemplifies how architecture can address both cultural demands and urban revitalization in a sensitive, contemporary manner.

Site and Urban Transformation

The theater was constructed on a 2,200-square-meter plot in the heart of Qazvin, directly adjacent to Mellat Park—one of the city’s largest and most historic green spaces. The site previously housed a cluster of neglected stalls in disrepair, structures that had not only lost their function but also posed social security challenges. The municipality’s decision to clear most of these stalls created an opportunity to reclaim this central location for the community, introducing a new cultural facility that resonates with the city’s heritage and its social fabric.

Although three of the old stalls could not be acquired, the architects skillfully adjusted the site plan to accommodate these remnants. What had once been a deteriorating and unsafe area has now been transformed into a welcoming urban space where people gather daily for performances, rehearsals, and community events.

Program and Spatial Organization

The project unfolds across three levels: a basement, a glass-ground floor, and an elevated white brick cube housing the main performance hall. The basement contains essential backstage functions, including restrooms, a workshop for set construction, storage areas, and utility spaces.

The ground floor serves as a transparent public base, accommodating rehearsal rooms, meeting and arbitration spaces, management offices, an information desk, ticketing, and a café. This glazed plinth establishes openness and accessibility, inviting the public into the building and blurring boundaries between the theater and the surrounding urban life.

Above this transparent level sits the white cube, an abstract volume that houses the main 220-seat Black Box theater and its waiting hall. The cube, resting directly above the glass volume, appears suspended, creating a striking architectural gesture of lightness despite the solidity of its form.

Design Challenges and Solutions

The most significant challenge of the project was the strict building height restriction of 8 meters imposed due to its proximity to Mellat Park. The Black Box hall, however, required a clear ceiling height of at least 5 meters, in addition to accommodating other functional spaces. To reconcile these constraints, the architects excavated the site by two meters, effectively sinking the ground floor and enabling the theater’s three levels to fit within the height limit.

This excavation also created terraced ledges around the building, designed as wide steps that provide informal seating for park visitors and theater-goers. These steps encourage gathering, resting, and street performances, extending the cultural program of the building into its immediate urban context. The result is a porous, civic architecture that enriches both the theater experience and public life around it.

Materiality and Façade Strategy

The City Theater’s identity is defined by the interplay between its translucent ground floor and the porous white brick cube above. The architects sought to reconcile two opposing needs: the openness and lightness appropriate for a public building adjacent to a park, and the enclosed, acoustically controlled environment required for a professional theater.

To achieve this, the Black Box was encased in a permeable brick shell built with a dry construction method. Custom-designed Teflon components fill the gaps between the bricks, creating a porous façade that allows daylight and filtered views to penetrate the waiting hall without compromising privacy or performance needs. This innovative envelope produces a dynamic play of light and shadow that shifts with the passing hours, while maintaining constant visual connections to the park’s trees, the street, and the activity beyond.

The glazed ground floor enhances this sense of permeability, offering transparency and a lively dialogue between the building’s interior functions and the city. Together, these layers create a building that is simultaneously solid and open, heavy and light, rooted and suspended.

Experience and Community Impact

The spatial experience of the theater is carefully choreographed. Visitors enter through the bright, porous waiting hall, immersed in views of Mellat Park, the street, and the movements of daily life. The presence of greenery, birds, and changing daylight creates a serene prelude. This openness contrasts dramatically with the experience of entering the Black Box hall, where all external connections are severed. In the darkened theater, focus shifts entirely to the stage, creating an immersive environment for performances.

Beyond its function as a performance venue, the City Theater has become a cultural anchor for Qazvin. It hosts rehearsals, children’s puppet shows, nightly performances, and even traditional Ta’ziyeh on religious days. The terraced seating around the building activates the public realm, supporting spontaneous street performances and offering new opportunities for gathering.

A Cultural Landmark for Qazvin

With its sensitive response to site conditions, height restrictions, and community needs, the City Theater of Qazvin is more than an architectural object—it is a transformative piece of urban infrastructure. By balancing transparency with enclosure, openness with focus, and tradition with innovation, the building redefines the relationship between theater and city. It not only provides a long-needed professional venue for performing arts but also enriches the everyday urban life of Qazvin, making culture accessible, visible, and celebrated in the heart of the city.

Photography: Deed Studio & Erfan Dadkhah