Oturmak Park: Earthquake Resistant Architecture for Rebuilding Home, Safety, and Community in Tabriz

A Gathering Place for Life After Earthquake

Reborn(Oturmak Park) is an architectural proposal shaped around one essential question: how can a city help people recover before, during, and after an earthquake? Designed as a shortlisted entry of Reborn by Mohammad Javad, Negin Shahidi, and Elahe Karami, the project reimagines a public park as a system of refuge, preparation, temporary housing, and long-term community rebuilding.

The word “Oturmak” is presented as a gathering place, and the project treats gathering not as a casual social activity, but as a survival mechanism. In a city like Tabriz, where earthquake risk is part of collective memory and urban anxiety, the park becomes more than landscape. It becomes an infrastructure of care.

This is where the proposal positions itself within earthquake resistant architecture. Rather than focusing only on stronger structures, Oturmak Park expands the definition of resilience. It considers emotional safety, children’s education, modular assembly, local materials, crisis management, food systems, public services, and the social dignity of displaced families.

Rebuilding the Idea of Home

Earthquakes do not only destroy buildings. They interrupt the sense of peace that people associate with home. For children especially, the loss of a stable, familiar environment can become one of the most difficult parts of recovery. Oturmak Park responds to this by introducing a place where people can understand, prepare for, and participate in the reconstruction of their own shelter.

The project begins with the psychological meaning of home. A house is not simply a roof, walls, and furniture. It is privacy, hygiene, safety, belonging, and self-respect. The design boards reflect this through a hierarchy of needs, moving from physiological requirements to safety, belonging, esteem, and self-realization.

This layered approach gives the project its depth. Oturmak Park is not only about emergency housing after disaster. It is about helping people regain control over daily life.

Earthquake Resistant Architecture as Social Infrastructure

The strongest idea in Oturmak Park is that disaster response should be embedded into the city before a crisis happens. The park is designed as a familiar public space that can transform into a recovery landscape when needed.

Its masterplan combines green zones, temporary housing units, community facilities, service infrastructure, markets, sports fields, bicycle paths, prayer and washroom areas, community gardens, and emergency support zones. These are not isolated functions. Together, they create a disaster-ready urban ecosystem.

This approach makes the project highly relevant to contemporary earthquake resistant architecture, where resilience is no longer limited to engineering performance. A truly resilient place must support evacuation, shelter, food access, medical response, storage, communication, emotional recovery, and social cooperation.

Oturmak Park turns this broader definition into a clear urban plan.

A Park Designed Before the Disaster

One of the most effective aspects of the project is its focus on preparation. The proposal does not wait for destruction to begin its work. It introduces training and scouting classes for children so that younger residents can learn how to respond in an emergency and assist others with greater confidence.

This educational layer is important. In many disaster scenarios, panic is worsened by unfamiliar systems. Oturmak Park proposes a space where families become familiar with the site, the shelters, the assembly process, and the shared services before an earthquake occurs.

The result is a park that functions in two modes. In normal times, it is a public landscape for gathering, sport, food, local markets, and community life. In crisis, it becomes a coordinated support system for shelter, relocation, storage, and recovery.

Modular Homes Inspired by Children’s Assembly Games

The second design board introduces one of the project’s most memorable concepts: “Assemble Your Home.” The units are designed to be assembled through a simple, almost game-like process inspired by childhood construction games. This is not merely a visual metaphor. It suggests that emergency housing can be understandable, repeatable, and accessible without requiring highly specialized skills.

The modular system begins with floor digging and base preparation, followed by structure, ceiling, and wall panels. The logic is sequential and clear. Families and local workers can understand how the unit comes together, which helps reduce dependence on distant or complex construction systems.

This modular strategy strengthens the project’s role in earthquake resistant architecture. In post-disaster conditions, speed, clarity, material availability, and repairability are as important as form. Oturmak Park addresses these needs through a housing system that is practical, expandable, and legible.

Local Materials and Regional Identity

The project also pays close attention to material identity. Its material palette includes wood, brick, green walls, and regional materials. These choices are not arbitrary. Wood is presented as suitable for Tabriz’s climate, brick connects the units to the visual character of the city, and green walls introduce gardening, softness, and scenery into temporary living spaces.

This is critical because emergency architecture often feels generic. Oturmak Park avoids that by rooting the design in local texture and cultural memory. The use of brick and regional materials allows the temporary shelters to feel connected to Tabriz rather than detached from it.

In this sense, the project understands that recovery requires more than efficiency. It also requires familiarity.

Planning the Home, Not Just the Shelter

The “Assemble Your Plan Home” diagrams show how the units can vary in layout. Different configurations allow the project to respond to different family sizes and needs. The plans include living, sleeping, service, and courtyard-like spaces, making the shelters feel more domestic than purely functional.

This matters because privacy and dignity are often compromised in emergency accommodation. Oturmak Park treats these needs as part of the design brief. The proposal considers hygiene, daily routines, furniture, storage, and internal comfort as essential elements of recovery.

The housing units are not conceived as anonymous tents. They are small homes with structure, material character, and a degree of personal organization.

Furniture, Services, and Daily Life

The project extends the assembly logic into furniture. Simple furniture systems can be constructed and arranged to support daily activities inside the units. This creates continuity between shelter, interior life, and self-sufficiency.

Beyond the units, the southern part of the site is developed as a service zone. It includes a helipad for emergency access and relocation, livestock areas, crisis management spaces, farmland, wood factories, and warehouses for essential supplies. These programs allow the park to function as a logistical base during and after an earthquake.

The inclusion of farmland, storage, and production spaces is especially important. It shows that the designers are thinking beyond the first few hours of disaster response. They are addressing the days, weeks, and months that follow.

Community, Culture, and the City of Tabriz

Oturmak Park is also carefully connected to the cultural identity of Tabriz. The presentation references local landmarks and traditions, including the Blue Mosque and bazaar, Tabrizian rugs, gardens such as El-Goli, and the broader touristic and historical landscape of the region.

These references help frame the project as part of the city’s continuity. Earthquake recovery is not treated as a blank restart. Instead, the park becomes a place where memory, culture, and future resilience meet.

The masterplan reinforces this by including public and semi-public functions such as markets, outdoor food courts, sports fields, community gardens, multipurpose spaces, and recreational zones. These areas keep the park active in everyday life, ensuring that it is not an abandoned emergency site waiting for disaster.

A More Humane Model of Disaster Recovery

The power of Oturmak Park lies in its humane interpretation of earthquake resistant architecture. It recognizes that people need strong structures, but they also need orientation, routine, emotional comfort, public services, and social support.

By combining modular housing with community planning, emergency services, local materials, and public education, the project proposes a park that is both preventive and restorative. It helps people prepare before an earthquake and recover after one.

For Tabriz, Oturmak Park offers a vision of resilience that is rooted in the act of gathering. It transforms fear into organization, displacement into community, and temporary shelter into a pathway back toward home.

Oturmak Park, the Reborn shortlisted project by Mohammad Javad, Negin Shahidi, and Elahe Karami, presents a thoughtful model for cities facing seismic risk. Its strength is not only in the design of modular homes, but in the way it connects those homes to education, culture, food, services, landscape, and collective recovery.

As a work of earthquake resistant architecture, it moves beyond the technical idea of protection. It proposes a broader architecture of survival, one where safety is physical, emotional, social, and civic. In Oturmak Park, rebuilding begins before disaster, and home becomes something a community can assemble together.