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The Tulip Hotel podium by day, its white cellular exoskeleton spanning over the retail frontage with the city skyline behind.

TulipHotel

Proposed beside Tehran’s historic quarter, Tulip Hotel addresses the absence of modern five-star accommodation close to the old town by stacking civic, hospitality and guest spaces around one core. Currency exchange, banking, reception, retail and a gym occupy the lower levels, followed by an amphitheatre, ceremony halls and restaurants before guest rooms begin at the fifth floor. Six plan types at the ground, fifth, tenth, seventeenth, twentieth and twenty-first floors rotate and contract the tower as it rises, ending with a panoramic restaurant at the twenty-third floor and a café above.

Location
Tehran, Iran
Typology
Hospitality and high-rise infrastructure
Scale
High-rise, multi-storey core
Tools
Rhino, Grasshopper, Lumion
Scope
Architectural core designVertical circulation coordinationStructural grid planning
Categories
Architecture · Hospitality
Daytime view of the tower base: a white cellular structure arching over the ground floor entrances, with planting, fountains and pedestrians on the plaza.
The same view after dark, the cellular structure lit from within its edges and the lounge and retail signage glowing behind the glazing.

A tower as a stack of civic rooms

The section is the argument. Storage sits at −25 m and parking at −15 m; the public programme occupies the first 25 m; guest floors run from there to roughly 110 m, where the restaurant sits, with the café above it at around 115 m. Because the plate changes shape as it rises, the exoskeleton has to resolve a different perimeter at every level. That is what produces the cellular geometry: it is a structural consequence, not a pattern applied to a facade.

Long section through the whole tower, cut away to show every floor from the storage and parking levels below ground, through the public podium and the guest floors, to the restaurant and cafe at the top.
  1. −25 mStorage, at the bottom of the core
  2. −15 mParking, stacked under the podium
  3. +0 mExchange, banking, reception, retail and the gym
  4. +25 mAmphitheatre, ceremony halls and restaurants
  5. +70 mGuest floors, the plate rotating and contracting as it rises
  6. +110 mPanoramic restaurant, with the cafe above it at +115 m

Function and section

Three floor plans at +0.00 m, +25 m and +100 m showing how the plate rotates from a rounded square to a diamond and contracts as it rises, annotated with programme icons.

Plate geometry at +0.00 m, +25 m and +100 m.

Long section through the tower with levels marked from −25 m storage and −15 m parking up through the public floors to the restaurant at +110 m and café at +115 m.

Section with levels from −25 m to +115 m.

Hotel lobby interior: a white cellular screen filtering low sun across a polished floor, with a timber reception desk, lounge seating and a slatted black ceiling.

The exoskeleton returns indoors as a screen, and does the shading work at ground level.