Gilak Villa by Davood Salavati is a highly esteemed winner of the very prestigious 2022 Silver A' Design Award in Architecture, Building and Structure Design Competition Category.
SilverArchitecture· 2022
Gilak Villa
Client: Davood Salavati
Silver A' Design Award Winner in Architecture Category
Verified Award Winner
Verify Award Status for #130433The Design
About Gilak Villa
Gilak is a villa designed for the humid climate of Gilan in northern Iran. The main mass of the building is formed around a central void, which is open on all floors from four directions and allows airflow and moisture to leave the interior. A corridor surrounds the building and prevents air confinement. Extended gables control direct sunlight in hot seasons. Sloping roofs on all four sides collect rainwater for reuse and offer a continuous surface for photovoltaic panels. The plan follows a nine-square geometry drawn from traditional Iranian architecture.
The Recognition
About the Silver A' Design Award
Gilak Villa is a Silver A' Design Award winner, an extraordinarily prestigious recognition granted to top-of-the-line, gorgeous, and impressive designs. Silver winners are tremendously brilliant and exceedingly creative works that illustrate the outstanding expertise, talent, and acuity of their designers. Gilak Villa is expected to be a wonderful, showpiece work that is remarkably professional and profoundly innovative. This Silver A' Design Award-winning design is a highly notable, admired invention that benefits and advances the boundaries of art, science, design, and technology. Gilak Villa is a vastly envied creation that evokes desires, introduces positive feelings, and sparks amazement and wonderment.
Where to Get It
Climate-Responsive Architectural Design
We design sustainable architecture integrating Iranian heritage with modern innovation. Our award-winning studio creates residential villas, commercial spaces, and offices that naturally control climate. Experience architecture honoring tradition while embracing environmental responsibility.
Discuss Your ProjectInterviews
Grand Interview
Your innovative integration of traditional Iranian climatic techniques into Gilak Villa's design has earned significant recognition, including the Silver A' Design Award - could you elaborate on how you adapted these historical architectural principles for contemporary living?
We believe that climate-responsive architecture allows us to learn from the paths our ancestors have taken—paths shaped by centuries of experience. By studying these traditional methods, we aim to extend their effective principles and reinterpret them for today’s needs, updating vernacular strategies and integrating them with contemporary techniques to reduce the reliance on non-renewable energy.Historical Iranian architecture offers abundant examples of utilizing clean and renewable resources—sunlight, wind, water (hydro), rainfall, and even the thermal capacity of the earth. In the Gilak Villa, we revisited these principles and transformed them through architectural form, functional mechanisms, spatial configuration, and thoughtful material composition.In doing so, we sought not to replicate tradition, but to renew it, shaping a contemporary architecture rooted in timeless ecological wisdom.
The central axis void design in Gilak Villa creates a fascinating natural ventilation system - what inspired this particular approach to managing humidity and airflow in Gilan's challenging climate?
In traditional Iranian architecture—particularly in hot–dry, hot–humid, and temperate–humid climates—we see remarkable examples of how the "Stack Effect" was used to move air naturally. Atriums, thermal chimneys, central courtyards, domes with ventilation openings, and vertical shafts all served as intelligent mechanisms for guiding airflow.In the Gilak Villa, this heritage inspired us to reinterpret the ventilation shaft as a renewed, contemporary system placed at the core of the building. By using temperature differentials between surfaces, and by carefully controlling the size of air inlets (larger than the outlet openings), we created a stable and manageable airflow throughout the house.This system helps extract internal moisture before it can damage surfaces, and it prevents condensation from settling within the structure. It also significantly contributes to reducing indoor temperatures during the warmer months.
How does Gilak Villa's nine-square geometric technique, derived from Iranian architecture and carpet patterns, contribute to both the functional aspects of climate control and the cultural identity of the building?
The use of the "Nine-Square" geometric layout—arranged as three-by-three modules within a primary mother square—served several essential purposes in the design of the Gilak Villa. This configuration allowed us to establish a clear central core at the heart of the project and to position the vertical circulation in an optimal and coherent manner.Functionally, the geometric order creates a balanced quadrilateral form that enhances natural ventilation from the building’s lateral faces and improves solar control. It also enables the formation of a four-sided pitched roof, which efficiently manages and channels the region’s heavy seasonal rainfall.Culturally, this geometry echoes traditional Iranian spatial logic and the modular patterns found in Persian carpets. Circulation is organized as a continuous loop around the central axis, generating spaces of equal hierarchy and a unified spatial rhythm—qualities deeply rooted in Iran’s architectural heritage.
Behind the Design
Press Kit
Credits, team members and technical details provided by the designer.
- Unique Properties
- The main mass of the building is formed around the central axis, which is designed as an integrated void and in all floors, there are openings to it from all four directions, which cause airflow and moisture to escape from inside the building. The surrounding movement path, which exists as a corridor around the building, helps the airflow and prevents air confinement.
The stretch of the gables on the corridors around the building controls the direct sunlight inside the building in hot seasons and prevents the ambient temperature from rising.
Sloping and homogeneous roofs on all four sides of the building can control rainwater and at the end, direct rainwater to a path for collection and reuse. Also, the integrated roof surface provides the ability to use photovoltaic panels.
Radiation, humidity, and airflow control throughout the building are automatic with minimal consumption of non-renewable energy. - Dimensions & Packaging
- It's a concept design.
- Tags
- Gilak Villa, climatic architecture, traditional building
- Research
- The climatic architecture of traditional buildings in their evolution can be the best source of inspiration and underlie today's architectural ideas. Tribal trial and error in diverse lands have created a great civilization in housing and along with intellectual maturity in the field of civil engineering and architecture, has reached the ability to largely control the annoying and harmful factors. With the knowledge that humidity, wind, radiation, et in addition to being able to eliminate basic needs. If they are out of comfort range, they are more or less irritating. The original Iranian architecture in different climatic regions has achieved very significant indigenous and sustainable answers that have sometimes been forgotten due to the modern way of life.
Nowadays, the extreme consumption of unsustainable energies of human society has caused many problems and obstacles sustainable indigenous techniques that have been using traditional technologies and integrating them with original and efficient geometries, have provided very appropriate answers in their time and are the best option to help architectural design today.
In our project, an attempt has been made to use the climatic techniques of temperate and humid regions in Iran; which control humidity, wind, radiation and bring the standard of living closer to the comfort range. These items work best in the form of a nine-square geometric technique and are based on the geometry of Iranian architecture and Iranian carpets.
The main mass of the building is formed around the central axis, which is designed as an integrated void and in all floors, there are openings to it from all four directions, which cause airflow and moisture to escape from inside the building. The surrounding movement path, which exists as a corridor around the building, helps the airflow and prevents air confinement.
The stretch of the gables on the corridors around the building controls the direct sunlight inside the building in hot seasons and prevents the ambient temperature from rising.
Sloping and homogeneous roofs on all four sides of the building can control rainwater and at the end, direct rainwater to a path for collection and reuse. Also, the integrated roof surface provides the ability to use photovoltaic panels.
Radiation, humidity, and airflow control throughout the building are automatic with minimal consumption of non-renewable energy. - Inspiration
- The climatic architecture of traditional buildings in their evolution can be the best source of inspiration and underlie today's architectural ideas. Tribal trial and error in diverse lands have created a great civilization in housing and along with intellectual maturity in the field of civil engineering and architecture, has reached the ability to largely control the annoying and harmful factors. With the knowledge that humidity, wind, radiation, et in addition to being able to eliminate basic needs. If they are out of comfort range, they are more or less irritating. The original Iranian architecture in different climatic regions has achieved very significant indigenous and sustainable answers that have sometimes been forgotten due to the modern way of life.
Nowadays, the extreme consumption of unsustainable energies of human society has caused many problems and obstacles sustainable indigenous techniques that have been using traditional technologies and integrating them with original and efficient geometries, have provided very appropriate answers in their time and are the best option to help architectural design today.
In our project, an attempt has been made to use the climatic techniques of temperate and humid regions in Iran; which control humidity, wind, radiation and bring the standard of living closer to the comfort range. These items work best in the form of a nine-square geometric technique and are based on the geometry of Iranian architecture and Iranian carpets. - Project Duration
- Gilak Villa is located in Gilan, a province that is located in the north of Iran and along the southern shores of the Caspian Sea its prominent features are humidity and heavy rainfall.
In this region, the trend of expansion is based on climatic priorities and from the south, east, west, and then in height. The combination of these factors, along with the extroversion factor, has led to the creation of a unique architecture that can be considered as the main reason for its formation. In general, extroversion with a sloping roof is a special feature of the architecture of this area. In this architecture, there is no clear boundary between inside and outside, and semi-open spaces and transparent layers of the house combine the inside and outside space. The transparency and semi-openness of the outer layers of the building, the effect of weather conditions such as sun, wind, rain, etc. as well as summer and winter on the lives of residents and their connection with nature as much as possible. - Team Members
- Davood Salavati
Amirali Sharifi
Nazli Azarkhsh.
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