Pargar Architecture Splits a Tehran Home in Two and Bridges the Gap with Glass

A house that physically separates itself into two buildings and then reconnects them with glass is making a bet: that the space between rooms matters as much as the rooms themselves. Rafieian's House in Tehran, designed by Pargar Architecture and Design Studio under the leadership of Behzad Heidari and Shirin Samadian, takes that bet seriously. Two buff brick volumes sit side by side at different elevations, linked by transparent bridges that turn every trip from kitchen to bedroom into a conscious passage through light, air, and sky.

The concept orbits around three phases: "being," "passing," and "arriving." Rooms are places of being and arriving. The glass bridges are passing. It sounds abstract until you walk through it and realize the architects have engineered a house where you cannot move from one zone to another without being briefly exposed to the weather, the time of day, and your own reflection. The 469-square-meter residence, completed in 2024, treats transition not as leftover hallway space but as the emotional core of the project.

Two Volumes, One Conversation

From the street, Rafieian's House reads as a cluster of stacked brick masses rather than a single monolithic residence. The larger volume houses the communal ground floor, with the living room, kitchen, and main stairway, while its upper level holds bedrooms and a secondary living room. The smaller volume takes on the dining room, TV area, guest room, and a master bedroom above. This division is not arbitrary. It separates social and private programs into distinct structures, giving each a different ceiling height and orientation.

The staggering of the two buildings at different elevations creates a sectional richness that a single rectangular plan could never achieve. Voids, terraces, and overhangs emerge naturally from the offset, and the space between the volumes becomes an inhabited courtyard rather than a setback.

The Glass Bridges as Spatial Events

The glass bridges are the project's signature move, and they earn it. Spanning the gap between the two brick volumes, they function as enclosed corridors that are simultaneously inside and outside. Walls of glass reflect the interiors back at the residents while framing views of the courtyard below, the sky above, and the planted beds at grade. Linear skylights run along the top of one bridge, projecting tree shadows across concrete floors in a shifting mural that changes with the hour.

What prevents this from becoming a gimmick is that the bridges are the only way to move between the two halves of the house. You cannot avoid them. Every crossing is a moment of exposure, a reminder that you are leaving one place and entering another. The architects describe this as the act of "passing," and in practice it means the house never lets you sleepwalk through domestic routine.

Brick Skin and Its Textures

The buff brick envelope anchors the house in Tehran's material traditions while avoiding pastiche. Pargar uses the brick in flat, unadorned planes that let the geometry of the staggered volumes do the compositional work. Narrow vertical window slots puncture the facades with restraint, controlling solar gain while creating dramatic interior light conditions. Steel railings and concrete soffits provide a cooler counterpoint to the warm masonry, and overhanging trees soften the edges in every season.

The texture of the brick matters here. It is rough enough to catch light at low angles and hold shadows in its joints, giving the facades a shifting quality across the day. Against the smooth glass of the bridges, the contrast is deliberate: solid versus transparent, warm versus cool, permanent versus ephemeral.

The Courtyard as a Vertical Garden

Between and around the two volumes, a series of courtyards and garden pits create pockets of green at multiple levels. Young trees grow in gravel beds and concrete planters, casting dappled light on brick walls and metal railings. The ground-level courtyard includes timber decking, stepping stones, and a narrow passage walled in brick that functions as an outdoor room. On the lower floor, a lounge opens directly into a northern garden pit, pulling nature into the section of the house rather than confining it to a yard.

These planted zones are not decorative afterthoughts. They are the voids that make the split-volume strategy legible. Without them, the two buildings would feel like a duplex. With them, the house becomes a small campus organized around living landscape.

Interior Light and Transparency

Inside, the double-height living room is the spatial anchor of the larger volume. Glazed walls open it to a terrace on one side, and a tall skylight floods it from above, making the room feel taller than its actual dimensions. Floor-to-ceiling windows elsewhere frame the internal courtyard, pulling greenery into the field of vision from nearly every seat. The architects clearly calibrated each opening to control what you see and how much sky you get, and the result is a house that feels porous without sacrificing privacy.

Water and Stone as Ground Elements

At grade, the project introduces a secondary material palette. A circular stone water feature sits in a narrow side courtyard between a textured concrete wall and the brick facade, bringing sound and reflection into a tight space. At the rear, a rectangular swimming pool stretches beneath large windows, connecting the interior to a controlled slice of sky. The covered entrance uses stepping stones set between brick walls and planted beds, choreographing the approach to the front door as a sequence of compressions and releases.

These ground-level elements reinforce the house's central thesis: transition is an experience worth designing. Even the act of arriving at the front door requires negotiating a deliberate path through landscape and material.

Plans and Drawings

The floor plans reveal how the central courtyard organizes circulation across all three levels, with rooms wrapping around the void and the glass bridges visible as thin lines spanning the gap. Section drawings are where the project's ambition becomes clearest. Staggered floor plates, sloped terrain, exterior staircases, and flanking trees all appear in relation to each other, showing how the architects exploited the site's natural grade to create a house that steps down through multiple levels without ever feeling buried. The elevation drawings confirm the restrained fenestration strategy: tall openings placed sparingly in otherwise solid brick planes.

Why This Project Matters

Rafieian's House matters because it takes a conceptual proposition, that the threshold between inside and outside deserves its own architecture, and builds it literally. The glass bridges are not metaphors. They are rooms you walk through every day, rooms that change with the weather and the time of day, rooms that refuse to let domestic life become automatic. In a city as dense and fast as Tehran, carving out these moments of awareness within a private residence is a genuinely useful architectural contribution.

The project also demonstrates that splitting a house into two buildings can produce spatial richness that a single envelope cannot. Courtyards, voids, level changes, and bridges all emerge from the decision to divide the program, and they reward the residents with variety in light, view, and atmosphere within a relatively modest footprint. Pargar Architecture has produced a house that is philosophically ambitious without losing its grip on livability, and that balance is harder to achieve than either quality alone.

Rafieian's House by Pargar Architecture and Design Studio. Tehran, Iran. 469 m². Completed 2024. Lead Architects: Behzad Heidari, Shirin Samadian. Photography by Parham Taghioff.

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