Jahad Metro Plaza/ KA Architecture Studio. Photo © Mohammad Hassan Ettefagh
In Iran’s capital, Tehran, movement defines the city. Each day, millions navigate a landscape shaped by highways, traffic corridors, and dense urban blocks. Over decades of rapid expansion, infrastructure has become the dominant language of development. Streets prioritize vehicles, sidewalks function as narrow conduits, and many public spaces operate primarily as passages rather than places of gathering. Across parts of West Asia, ongoing conflict has also reshaped the region’s urban landscapes, where significant architectural environments have been damaged or transformed. Within this broader context, the preservation and creation of everyday civic space becomes increasingly meaningful. Recognized with the Aga Khan Award for Architecture, the Jahad Metro Plaza project, designed by KA Architecture Studio, demonstrates how modest infrastructural interventions can reshape the civic life of a city.
The metro network plays a central role in Tehran’s daily life. It connects distant districts and sustains the rhythms of the metropolis. Yet the places where the underground city meets the surface are rarely conceived as civic environments. Metro entrances typically appear as fragments of infrastructure: stairs descending below ground, surrounded by railings, kiosks, and improvised circulation paths. They function efficiently as thresholds, but seldom as places to remain.