Palladium Mall — a 12th-anniversary week
The brief
Palladium Mall in Zafaranieh was turning twelve. A mall’s birthday is usually handled with a banner and a sale, which tells people it happened without giving them any reason to come. The week of 5 to 10 September had to be worth coming back to more than once.
The idea
Build the week out of different reasons to be there. A concert one evening, magic, a painter at work in the middle of the mall, something for children every day — each one aimed at a different visitor, all of it under the celebration’s line: twelve years together, thousands of stories still going on.
What we made
KHN planned and ran the event. At its centre was the twelfth-birthday carousel, a blue and gold structure crowned with a 12 and ringed with bulbs, built for the atrium. Around it, the programme:
- live music from Mohsen Sharifian and the Lian band
- magic by Danial Kazemi, on stage and close up with visitors
- live painting — Mani Kumar built an abstract canvas stroke by stroke until it resolved into a map of Iran, and a second artist painted another piece live over the same week
- a children’s programme on every day of the celebration
- the Palladium Passport, stamped at each activity, and the prize draws it fed
Craft notes
The carousel went up inside a mall that never closed. The behind-the-scenes film shows it plainly: lifts and half-assembled panels on the floor while shoppers walk past. Building in public means no stage of the work is hidden. Someone sees the structure half-finished, so every stage has to look deliberate, not just the last one.
The films and stills on this page come from the reels published during the celebration.
We do not decorate a business. We give it a world to stand in.
