59 Under: Reclaiming Tehran's Abandoned Qanats as Underground Cultural Infrastructure

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This article covers topics related to Urban Design, Persian Architecture, Cultural Architecture. A Mobius-strip-inspired intervention turns ancient water channels beneath Tehran into spiraling subterranean spaces for art and community.

A Mobius-strip-inspired intervention turns ancient water channels beneath Tehran into spiraling subterranean spaces for art and community.

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UNI published Blog under Urban Design, Persian Architecture on Sep 23, 2025

Beneath Tehran's congested streets and smog-choked skyline lies a forgotten network of Qanats, ancient underground water channels that once sustained the city. They are abandoned now, relics sealed off from the urban life that sprawls above them. 59 Under asks a disarmingly simple question: what if the city's cultural life moved downward, into the very infrastructure it has neglected?

Designed by Sara Mahabadi, Ali Nazari, Zahra Rastegarzadeh, and Hamid Attaran, the project reimagines Tehran's subterranean voids as active cultural venues: spaces for art exhibitions, performances, and community gatherings. Rather than competing for increasingly scarce surface land, the designers propose a single, modest door at ground level as the only architectural gesture above the street. That door becomes both urban furniture and portal, an invitation to descend into an entirely different spatial world.

Mapping the Invisible City Below the Surface

Diagram showing underground qanat channels in red beneath a dense urban fabric with aerial photograph

The diagram above overlays Tehran's Qanat network, rendered in red, against an aerial photograph of the city's dense urban fabric. The contrast is striking. Above ground, the city is a gridlock of built mass with almost no room for new intervention. Below ground, a branching system of channels extends outward like veins, connecting aquifers to the metropolitan core. These tunnels were engineered centuries ago to move water; now they sit dormant, structurally intact but functionally dead. The mapping exercise is more than analytical. It is the project's foundational argument: Tehran already possesses a second layer of infrastructure. The task is not to build new space but to reprogram what already exists.

A Continuous Surface That Refuses to Distinguish Wall from Floor

Rendering of spiraling horizontal floor plates creating a helical tower form against distant mountains

White interior corner where curved ceiling meets a cylindrical column and cantilevered floor slab

The formal language of 59 Under draws directly from the Mobius strip, a single continuous surface with no definable inside or outside. In the rendering, spiraling horizontal floor plates wrap around one another to create a helical form set against the distant Alborz mountain range. The geometry is not decorative. It serves as the organizational logic for circulation: ramps spiral downward, dissolving conventional distinctions between wall, floor, and ceiling. Visitors move through the space along a path that gradually reveals program rather than depositing them into discrete rooms.

The interior detail reinforces this continuity. A curved white ceiling rolls seamlessly into a cylindrical column, which in turn meets a cantilevered floor slab. There are no sharp transitions, no moments where structure announces itself as separate from enclosure. The effect is spatial fluidity: a single architectural surface that shapes the body's movement and directs attention toward the cultural activities embedded within it.

Ribbon-Like Voids and the Choreography of Descent

Overlapping curved floor plates creating ribbon-like voids through the tower section in render

The sectional rendering reveals how overlapping curved floor plates generate ribbon-like voids through the tower form. These openings are not leftover space; they are deliberate cuts that allow visual connection between levels, drawing daylight deeper into the structure and giving occupants a sense of the overall spatial volume as they descend. Cultural activities, from art installations to performance events, are distributed across the layered ramps so that the journey itself becomes part of the experience. There is no single destination. The architecture choreographs a continuous sequence of encounters.

The environmental logic is equally purposeful. Underground spaces naturally regulate temperature, reducing the energy demand for climate control in a city that swings between harsh summers and cold winters. By pulling cultural programming below grade, the project also relieves surface-level congestion, freeing above-ground land for open space rather than adding more built mass to an already saturated urban landscape.

Why This Project Matters

Tehran is not unique in its predicament. Cities worldwide face the twin pressures of densification and heritage loss, often treating them as separate problems. 59 Under collapses them into a single design proposition: the very infrastructure that cities have outgrown can become the vessel for their cultural future. The Qanat system is not merely preserved as a relic; it is activated, loaded with new social purpose while retaining its historical identity.

What makes the proposal convincing is its restraint at the surface. A single door, nothing more. The ambition is entirely subterranean, and that inversion of architectural spectacle carries a pointed critique: cities do not always need to build upward or outward to grow. Sometimes the most radical move is to look beneath what already exists and discover that the infrastructure for a different kind of urban life has been waiting there all along.