studio chahar
Sarzurzuma at Chicago
Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago Architecture Biennial 5, This is a Rehearsal. November 2023 to February 2024. Pavilion and exhibition.
Sarzurzuma, in the local dialect of Gouron, is “the point where waves meet from different directions and get neutralized”: a reef in the Hara mangrove forest on Qeshm Island, Iran, a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve within the Qeshm Island UNESCO Global Geopark. By its formation the reef supports the growth of the forest and stabilizes the shore.
The site also holds the endangered heritage of traditional wooden boatbuilding. Since 2019, Studio Chahar has worked with master boatbuilders and the village of Gouron on community-based interventions to slow erosion at Sarzurzuma, and has prototyped public pavilions that take their cues from boatbuilding and palm weaving.
For the fifth Chicago Architecture Biennial, the pavilion became an experimental pavilion and multi-media exhibition on climate change, community, craft and political isolation, using boatbuilding as a common language between places once joined by the maritime Silk Route through the Strait of Hormuz. The pavilion was built in Rockland, Maine, with the ApprenticeShop boatbuilding school, from CNC-machined parts made with boatbuilder and CNC draftsman Gardner Pickering and from salvaged wood from boatbuilding shops along the Maine coast. Visitors were invited to sit, or to take off their shoes and crawl in.
Behind it, laser-engraved transparent layers on boards from a box that once travelled the Maine coast aboard a wooden boat show four chapters, the Sarzurzuma reef, Hara mangrove trees, wooden boats in Qeshm and Rockland, and the pavilion, on a timeline from September 2019 to September 2023. The pavilion was donated afterwards to 6018North, a youth nonprofit in Chicago.
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